Galivant's Travels into the Remote Nations

Murder and Mayhem

2012-02-03T12:39:00.001-06:00

As you look over the rail, or out the port, at your new neighbor in our floating cruising community, you don’t expect to find a murderer, if in fact you would recognize said character, even with binoculars. The most ‘violence’ I’ve seen in my vicinity, ever, is a heated discussion about anchoring, or with a recalcitrant outboard motor.

But there were two murders in this very cruising fleet in the San Blas last year, and two associated boat thefts. The cases have not yet come to trial, but it appears that one Javier Martin, a Spaniard who ran a boat for backpackers that went on the reef early one morning, got his next boat by murdering its owner. Then an American, Don North, went missing. Eventually Javier Martin was arrested on his way out of Panama with North’s money and passport. North’s body has never been found, but there’s plenty of circumstantial evidence.

Now this episode is being ‘television-ized’ and will be shown on the CBS program 48 Hours, airing February 4 2012 under a title of something like “Dark Side of Paradise”. All my information is fourth-hand or worse and certainly not to be relied upon, but I think there may also be coverage of some other spooky stuff that went on up in Bocas del Toro, Panama involving a character dubbed “Wild Bill”.

Add to this a tale overheard recently about a man whose wife was encouraged to convert her money into precious metal, kept on the boat, and then to take a short trip home, during which time he made plans to sail off with someone else, well, you gotta wonder, what else is going on out here?

Also, it will be fun to watch the race, as cruisers try to get a copy of the program, via various cobbled together bits of technological capabilities (not including adequate internet), or mail drop, or visiting guest. “We should have it by March”, I heard this morning. Well, there’s no rush.

The Swimming Pool anchorage, San Blas, Panama

2012-01-30T00:56:00.001-06:00

Ever since we've been within radio range of the Southwest Caribbean, we’ve been hearing about the Swimming Pool. It's one of the best known anchorages in all of the San Blas islands off the Caribbean coast of Panama, the kind of place where people stay for months, even years. The careful radio listener will also hear about the Hot Tub, Bug Island, Green Island, and more, but good luck finding out where any of these places are, because these are the cognoscenti cruiser names, not the Kuna names that appear on the chart.

The Swimming Pool turns out to be in the Eastern Holandes, beyond Quinquindup and north of Banedup (aka Bug Island). The Hot Tub is south of Ukupsuit and Kalugirdup- you can see whyfor the nicknames, but it's nice to know the real ones as well. The Holandes Cays make a convenient landfall, and to quote our number one source, Eric Bauhaus’s The Panama Cruising Guide: 'since they are the islands furthest from the mainland, the waters are clear nearly year round. Their natural beauty and easy navigation have made the Holandes Cays a popular destination…a very scenic area of calm, translucent waters and towering coconut palms". This anchorage is behind an extensive barrier reef as well as the islands, so the wind generator is in its element, whirling day and night to power the watermaker to refill our tanks with non-chlorinated product.

We were so slowed down by current on our 180+-mile passage from Cartagena this week that we had to hang out offshore an extra night, the dark one where the last of the old moon and the start of the new pass their baton under the bright eye of the sun.

The pretty pink tracks on our electronic charts might have been sufficient, even after dark, to get us into the anchorage we had entered several times before. But the story of a boat on the reef at Sail Rock near Porvenir as of Christmas Eve reminded us yet again of how fast things can go wrong. What exactly worries you about this, I asked Doug. He answered - the same thing that worries you, the reefs all around, the dark. Not much more to say, so we hove-to twenty miles away and kept the kitchen timer working all night, admiring the stars and the clouds, and not too far off, some kind of schooner cruise ship all lit up, heading slowly east.

Much of the Pool area is 12 or 15 feet of flat clear white sand, so the namer did a good job. I've swum around this Pool before, but when I jumped in the other day during a period of stronger trade winds there was such a current I had a hard time staying in one place, much less progressing. There’s a lot of salt spray on the boat too; the Pool is a nicer place when the wind dies down a touch.

I’d say we’re at the height of the boating season here in the San Blas. The Saturday Jan 28 2012 Panama Connection radio net boat count revealed 128 boats anchored in the western San Blas area this week. Some anchorages had two or three, others had fifteen or twenty, and there were probably 10 or 12 anchorages mentioned.

The present attraction at the Swimming Pool is the presence of Mark on Melody. He makes regular runs to Panama in his 40-foot sloop, carrying backpackers, and also carrying groceries, including frozen stuff, batteries, parts and other cruiser supplies. Some of these he stores on another sloop which he leaves anchored in the PooI, waiting for a buyer.

Send him a list, double-spaced, capital letters of what you're looking for, and he'll shop for it in Panama City and bring it back to the Pool for cost plus thirty percent. His main, but not his only, source is PriceMart, where he can be seen with a line of shopping carts, a section of each devoted to one particular customer. When he gets back to the Pool and starts to unload, he calls you on the VHF for you to come pick up. It's quite a service, and next time, if there is one, I hope I can speak from personal experience of it, instead of just being an envious voyeur. Doug knows about the Peanut M&Ms, so watch out!

PHOTO MELODY, DELIVERING

Or, maybe no photos – trouble uploading. We're back in the land of very few and far away cell towers and very slow service even at 3AM, so forget that panorama video too. But we’re here, and happy about it.

Technorati Tags: San Blas anchorages

Feliz Año 2012

2012-01-01T21:12:00.001-06:00

"La Gorda" is a famous sculpture by Botero, Colombia's best-known sculptor.
Every time I pass by, something interesting is happening here.

The rainy season in Cartagena has been over for almost two weeks now, and the holiday season is in full swing. Lots of new folks in town, the high-rise apartment buildings have many more occupied units, and I can report with secret pleasure that Americans are not the only tourists who sometimes fail to impress.

Little bits of masking tape everywhere!

For us, the end of the rainy season means that work in the boatyard can finally proceed. Masking tape is coming off. Things like canvas and cushions are going back on the boat. We stagger home at the end of the day ready to vegetate. Still can't quite say when we'll be out of here, but it is getting closer, faster! And, much as we have enjoyed being part of the city, we'll be ready for water we can swim in and fish we feel comfortable eating,

New Year's seems a bigger, more festive, more holiday-like holiday than Christmas. We spent both days in the boatyard, where our celebration was the use of the scaffolding, accompanied by some pretty nice music coming in from the barrio. When we left the boatyard on New Year's Eve, the children were making 'scarecrows' of old clothes stuffed with dry leaves, (using a bottle of Johnny Walker Red as a prop) and today we saw the ashes of same in the middle of the road, custom being to start the new year fresh with new clothes, paint on the house, etc.
Since we were up anyhow, auditing a party around the corner, we walked into town to see the fireworks. It was quite the event, streets full of cars, sidewalks full of people hanging out, from 3-generation families, to golden youth, the girls striking poses for their friends' cameras in their skin-tight short dresses and impossibly high heels, everyone well behaved.

Lots of lights and action downtown.

I know from last year that there are elegant catered parties set up on the city walls and in certain of the plazas and I'm pretty sure the parties continued for hours. But I didn't.

Party being set up for New Year's Eve 2010. I'd have stayed awake for this
party if only to see how the use of the VIP portable toilet compared to the
generic.

Where we're staying now is quite near the Club de Pesca in Manga, a residential district which is to Cartagena Centro or Boca Grande as Eastport is to Annapolis. We're in the back yard of a waterfront house directly across from a small parking area which has revealed itself to be quite the party spot. Kids with cars (so, clearly fairly well-to-do) have tail-gate parties that sometimes last into sunrise. While I am glad I don't live on the front side of this little parcel, I have to say that there is some fantastic music in this country, even at 3 AM. I wish I could get names, because there are also opportunities to buy CDs on the street, but I'd have to wander out in my nightgown. Also, people are remarkably tolerant. Sometimes I do get up and peer through the gate, waiting for the neighbors to get irate. Instead I see a police officer casually strolling the opposite sidewalk, as the party goes on, really, just like in the beer ads. At daybreak the barraderos/sweepers are out in their orange suits and the morning vendors are calling out their wares, even on New Year's Day.
The waterfront paseo also features every little kid who got a new bike for Christmas, plus skateboarders, nannies and their charges, joggers, dog walkers, ice-cream vendors, young lovers, and a few older ones too, fishermen and photographers and people practicing some kind of Brazilian 'judo'. It's an ever-changing scene and I'm pleased to be privy to it.
So, I'll wish everyone all the best in the new year, health, prosperity and good karma; and a little extra for me - Spanish verb tenses and some greater understanding of the Mac mind. But don't hold your breath for big progress in the latter two!

Big Holiday Weekend

2011-11-21T04:50:00.001-06:00

11/11/11 is also the anniversary of Colombia’s Independence from Spain. Well, maybe I should say Cartagena’s Independence, since they were the first ones to declare and it seems to have taken a while to get it all together. In any event, it’s the holiday of the year. Flags are flying. Decorations hang from the trees in the parks in Centro, and line the streets. There’s a parade somewhere every day, starting with children and getting progressively wilder as the weekend progressed. Being otherwise occupied, we didn’t attend any, but we enjoyed watching the peripheral activities and the TV reports.

Down in the barrio by the boatyard, Doug is ‘held up’ by children operating a mini-toll booth with a string across the road; any coin will get him thru it, and a whole lot of giggling ensues. Among other popular past=times are throwing water at people (Doug got dumped on by two young women on the fifth floor of a highrise, but the water had ‘fallen apart’ before reaching him), powdering them with Maizena, and squirting them with foam. You might also get 'held up' by youths with something black and messy looking in their bucket - probably they prefer bills! The boat yard workers have a half day off, and then a full day, and I’m glad for them, considering how much weekend work they put in dodging the rainy season.
I watched these folks splash a passer-by out of their big blue barrel, but they stopped when the police on the motorcycle passed.
A taxi driver warned us against drunks and pickpockets of course, but after watching some young bucks chugging aguardiente in the back of the bus, we knew that!
Friends in the anchorage reported that the boat parade consisted of large rowing boats each with a beauty queen as figurehead. What we saw from our balcony looked more like a giant raft-up that formed twice, once near Centro and again in front of Boca Grande. There were hundreds of boats. Where did they all come from?

And each one was packed with folks. Doug wondered if they all had lifejackets; I wondered where all those women would pee!
The main event of Independence Festivities, at least in Cartagena, however, is the national beauty pageant. Miss Colombia is selected this weekend. and she will go on to compete in Miss Universe contests, as well as be given sponsorship contracts, clothing, jewelry, perfume, even, a taxi driver told us, a Rolex watch worth two thousand dollars. At least one past Miss Colombia also received ‘a mansion from the government.’ Being Miss Colombia also may guarantee the winner ‘minor celebrity’ status for life. One, out of office for 25 years, was suffering from some kind of botched plastic surgery, I read in a society magazine, in the dermatologist’s office!
From what I’ve seen, these Señorita Colombias look like Barbie dolls, all in matchy-matchy outfits and there’s not a one who doesn’t look ‘perfect’ in every conventional respect; or wasn't helped along by a plastic surgeon, say certain observers. The critique is that they represent the richer, whiter segment of society.

I even noticed, in Boca Grande, posters on the phone poles of contestants hoping to lure votes, plastered over posters of less attractive political candidates from last month’s election. For these women, it didn’t help.So, there’s also an alternative contest, for the Queen of the Barrios (Miss Independence), and here, while the girls are beautiful of course, they’re a lot more varied in appearance, and the prizes are significantly smaller. Last year's crown was donated by a metal-plating company, for example.
The controversy about these contests, according to a report last year in the NY Times, can be summarized like this: href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/01/world/americas/01colombia.html">http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/01/world/americas/01colombia.html
Here’s the short version-

“One pageant portrays Cartagena as its elite wants it to be seen: rich, white and glamorous,” said Elisabeth Cunin, a French sociologist who studies Cartagena. “The other reflects the reality of the city as the majority of its inhabitants know it: poor and neglected, a complex mix between racial domination and an emerging current of black consciousness.”
The national pageant, founded here in 1934 as a tourism linchpin, employs a multilingual staff at an air-conditioned building in Parque de Bolívar in the old center, attracting sponsors like Edox, a Swiss watch manufacturer. The municipal contest, created in 1937, operates on a shoestring budget from a crumbling structure a few blocks away.
Few nations, with the exception of neighboring Venezuela, attach as much importance to such pageants. In addition to Miss Colombia and Miss Independence, Colombian juries award many lesser titles, like Miss Plantain and Miss Coal. Cellblocks in a Bogotá women’s prison have their own pageants. One town in northern Colombia takes it even further, putting makeup and wigs on its donkeys then parading them for its annual Miss Burro celebration.”

And, if you’ve got ten minutes and bandwidth, here’s a YouTube video (with music) by a bouncy CuriousTraveler, with bits of video from each contest (last year) which I came across while I trying to find a picture of this year’s winners.http://www.youtube.com/watch?NR=1&v=-KM2miKhRP4Drumroll:Here’s the winner of this year’s Miss Colombia “following a rigorous competition of beauty, wits and winning smiles”, says ColombiaReports.com, from whence this picture came. Daniella made the front page and the contest got several pages in the Society section of the paper El Universal.

In the alternate contest, Miss Independence (Reina de los Barrios)got a full-length photo in the middle of the paper, plus a photo of her parents, but her webmaster maybe hasn’t posted her yet, that I have found.

There is certainly no shortage of beautiful women in Cartagena. But one taxi driver assures me that there are even more beautiful women in Medellin. In Cartagena, though, they have better bodies, he thinks.

Room with a View

2011-11-13T11:45:00.001-06:00

Technorati Tags: Cartagena

We’re living in the lap of luxury here in Cartagena, during our time in the boatyard, at least for three weeks. We’re in a Gleaming Contemporary Studio Apartment full of Nice Stuff, on the 12th Floor of edificio Vista in the Manga district, up where the pelicans fly, with a Most Scenic View Over Historic Cartagena and Castillo San Felipe. We stroll in after our 15-minute bus commute from the boatyard, take off our clothes and put them in the Washing Machine, get a Cold Drink with Ice from the Full Refrigerator (Shelves! Light! Self-Cleaning!) and then drift up one floor to the Rooftop Jacuzzi and Infinity Pool – fine places to bask and admire the sunset pastels and rehydrate after a hot day. The Big-Headed Shower with Hot Water pours down unstintingly, although the 5x5 (that’s feet!) Mirror has Shocking and Malign powers. Sometimes we even eat Food Not Prepared At Home. Then we Relax in Air-Conditioned Comfort before our various Entertainment Devices until the Lure of the Most-Comfortable and Well-Clad King-Sized Bed proves irresistible.

And it’s all ours until the middle of November, when we retreat back down to earth. Life is Grand.

The voyeur in me is happy for such a good spy perch, the neatnik (yes, there is one!) mops and fluffs and makes the bed every morning; the wastrel lavishly fills the spaghetti pot all the way full of water, and has left lights burning in non-occupied areas. Doug claims that somewhere in India there’s a power failure because of me. I think he’s going to wear out the TV remote. For extra fun we take the trash to the chute and listen as it tumbles down 12 stories. As you can see, we’re Living Large.

We’re supposed to be strolling the town in the evenings, but between the nice digs, the pool and the balcony and the luxurious ease and ambiance of our aerie, not to mention the fast internet, the satellite TV, and climate control, we generally stay put and let the entertainment come to us. The big sky, the passing scene, we gawp at it all. Last night Cartagena delivered fireworks, front and center.

Meanwhile, the other half of life is at Manzanillo Marina Club down in the Bosque barrio, where Galivant is propped on a few locally-built jackstands. Its innards are torn open and it’s a veritable dustbowl on deck as we make some fiberglass repairs and get ready for painting.

“We” mainly means Flavit and his crew who are doing the dirty work. Not doing the work turns out to also be a chore. Every day offers a new illustration of the ways in which assumptions can mutate. Good thing that we’ve gotten a little less anal as we ourselves become a little less perfect. ‘It’s only a boat’ we remind ourselves. And a good thing too that Flavit is so pleasant and accommodating. Doug has lots of carpentry projects, and I am relieved to be the designated shopper, researcher and communicator. I can do a lot of that from ‘home’.

The fact that we can escape the heat and grime each day has a lot to do with our mellowness. I sure will be sorry to descend that elevator for the final time, get buzzed out the plate glass doors by the security guard, knowing that if my smiling face appears the next day I won’t get past the desk!

A few associated photos can be found here:

http://galivant.smugmug.com/Other/CartagenaRoomWithAView/20060616_f55c83

PS: even on the twelfth floor, the ants trek up over the edge of the balcony. How did they know I was here?

Quick Flight to Florida

2011-11-09T14:42:00.002-06:00

From the slow lane to the jet set, she does it all! Climbed down the ladder at 9:30 in the morning in Cartagena and laid my grateful head to rest on super-deluxe high-thread-count sheets in Lake Worth Florida a mere 12 hours later.

PHOTO aerial view of somewhere in Broward County

Momentum was building – we needed more stuff, a new computer with an American keyboard, and without Colombia’s crippling import duties. Bottom paint that we could use without sanding off all the previous applications. Odd bits and pieces like blades for a Fein tool, a GPS receiver for a computer. Upholstery and awning fabric. Mail for the last six months. So by golly I hopped on a plane and got it all. This after I heard what a friend had paid to have some prescriptions Fed-Exed to Colombia – it cost more than my flight on Spirit did!

Funny how you can just slip right back into the 65mph life, warm up the credit card and sign sign sign as if there were no tomorrow.

PHOTO Our new stuff on the pallet at International Business Cargo, Miami to Barranquilla shipping service.

I packed up a couple blue plastic crates of ‘hazardous materials’ lined with a new wardrobe from my aunt (and Goodwill!), schlepped them down to Miami and with only a few bumps they arrived at the boatyard in Cartagena a couple weeks later.

The worst part of the trip was the 2-hour drudge march through the line in front of US customs, which had my Colombian seatmates laughing about American pride in their superior ways!

Clearly the real estate bubble has had a real bursting effect on many lives- tales of woe abound -but the malls and highways of the former Everglades peninsula are still full. Florida seems like its same old oblivious self, so many constituencies at cross-purposes.

I enjoyed my visit, enjoyed my stay with my uncle and aunt, but also enjoyed getting back to a life for which I am perhaps a little better suited.

PHOTO water streaks and cloud reflections over Caribbean

Colon anchorage, Club Nautico

2011-10-17T15:59:00.006-06:00

From the water, Colon, Panama is an interesting place to be, especially if you’re interested in ships. At most hours, day or night, something is moving through the harbor. Sometimes it’s crew boats, maybe 40 feet long, but moving through at about 40 knots (the Resident Exaggeration Detector has flagged this number). About 40 times a day we all roll insanely. To be fair, there are a few crew boats who slow down, maybe to watch what happens.We're watching them too!

PHOTO DRAGONWING ROLLED BY CREW BOAT

One of our neighbors came home to find his galley stove thrown out of its gimballs. *

SCREEN SHOT OF COLON HARBOR CHART

The Club Nautico anchorage is a pretty compact piece of water, between some semi-derelict commercial boats along a piece of waste ground, and the red channel markers for the container- and car-carrier port called Manzanillo. Ninety percent of the time it’s actually a pretty good anchorage. What I like is the constant port activity – ships are coming and going all the time.

PHOTO CARGO SHIP

From our perch in the cockpit, we see them waiting at the breakwater, until the pilot boat comes, then, the tug joins them, and they slowly progress down the aisle of buoys. Will this one be turned around and pushed into one of the slots just opposite us , or is it’s spot under the other set of cranes further down the quay?

PHOTO WALL OF HAMBURGSUD CONTAINERS ABOARD LIVERPOOL EXPRESS

Cranes slide into place, and the containers are clamped and lifted, shuffled and stacked. One ship is entirely offloaded. The next leaves within the hour. It's not just containers either; we saw one shipful of brand new buses. We haven’t a clue what’s going on, which gives us endless theoretical headroom. Only the choreographer knows for sure. But who is the choreographer of this ballet of titans?

Having read recently that Panamax ships with 13 containers across the stern can be carrying 5000 to 7000 containers, the main question is: how do they make sure the one they want is where they can get at it? What specialty design education teaches that kind of organization? Also, What’s in all those containers? And, imagine, the new SuperPanaMax ships carry 9000 containers. How can a sniffer dog keep up? Cruise ships in St. Thomas have small boats constantly patrolling their seaward sides. But here, with many more ships, there seems much less visible security. This kind of meditation, and a pair of binoculars, keeps us occupied for hours. I’ve got more pictures than any one needs of colorful containers, and industrial machinery – can’t say why it fascinates me so.

Down the channel, near the Colon 2000 shopping center and the big duty-free zone is shipping on a different scale. I wish I knew what was going on here, beyond all the appliances being stevedored out of trucks and on to this small ship.

PHOTO APPLIANCE LOADING, CARMEN II

As for Club Nautico itself: there is no club, only an office that wants $5 every day we park the dinghy, and never has change. Also in the fenced and guarded compound are a pretty good seafood restaurant, a small marine/fishing store, a fuel dock, and docking for one of the crew-boat services. In the several days we’ve spent here we’ve been in the company of less than a dozen other boats; there’s not space for too many more. You could probably walk to Colon 2000 where there is a super-something-supermarket, but the cab drivers won’t let you!

PHOTO, VIEW TOWARDS SHORE NEAR CLUB NAUTICO

Once upon a time, on the other side of the Colon peninsula, there was a Panama Canal Yacht Club. It was a funky but eminently functional place that, half a dozen years ago, was bulldozed overnight by the juggernaut of the Panama Canal Authority, who apparently needed another container parking lot. You can still anchor at the Flats, and watch the ships passing to and from the locks, but there seems to be nowhere to land a dinghy. You can anchor outside Shelter Bay Marina; not sure what arrangement you’d have to make to use their facilities. That leaves Club Nautico as the best anchoring option.

For a slip in a marina, you’ll find yourself at Shelter Bay Marina. This is a fine facility, and getting better all the time. Located in a sheltered bay (!) at the top of the harbor breakwater, where the US military once kept patrol and maintenance boats, they have nice new docks, good electric, speedy wifi, a pool, small hotel, a restaurant much improved in recent months. They have a popular haulout, but not much in the way of skilled labor, and a storage yard with some ‘boot camp’ type rules, but this may change as the new, boater-friendly manager John Halley, ex-Club Nautico Cartagena smoothes out the user interface.

The downside is that Shelter Bay is half an hour from town on a marina bus; shopping or looking around can be a rushed experience or an expensive taxi ride home. The bus crosses canal locks, which means that sometimes you can get caught on the wrong side and wait another half hour or so as a ship locks through.

PHOTO ROAD CROSSING CANAL

Also, It costs a bit more than I’d care to spend, particularly to be so far out of town. But it’s the only game in town for hauling and storage, although a new marina at Green Turtle Bay near Nombre de Dios on the way to the San Blas, is said to be getting a travelift soon.

When we first got our AIS** , one of the first ships I remember seeing was the Henriette Schulte bound for Manzanillo, wherever that was. So, it was fun to see the same Henriette Schulte being escorted to a dock just across from us, and now I know where Manzanillo is. Then we saw Simon Schulte out in the anchorage. So I Googled and learned that there are nearly 100 other ships in the Bernhard Schulte Ship Management family, (several are quite new); plus a pin-up -(ship centerfolds?) type photo of Simon Schulte in locks of the canal, courtesy of the webcam at MarineTraffic.com. It's gotten five votes, by what standard, I wonder.

SIMON SCHULTE from Panama Canal WEBCAM

Another sight familiar in the canal transit season for yachts is the Arrival of the Tires. When they land on a neighboring yacht, like the roulette ball landing on their number, we know that tomorrow we that boat might be seen on the webcam. Those tires are cheap insurance against an encounter with the canal walls, and the stock in trade of one particular agent.

GALENA ATTIRED FOR CANAL TRANSIT

Maybe it will be our turn one of these days.

*gimballs: our stove is suspended on 'pins' on each side so that it can remain level when the boat rolls

**AIS (Automatic Identification System) is a nifty piece of technology. Ships are now required to broadcast certain details, name, dimensions, destination, course speed and other navigation data, and with our VHF antenna and a display unit we can read it, plus be alerted to their presence up to 13 miles away by a perimeter alarm.

What’s to like about Colon, Panama

2011-09-13T19:28:00.000-06:00

Colon is the small Panamanian city at the Caribbean (northern) side of the Panama Canal, and it has one of the worst reputations of any city in my modest sphere of awareness.

PHOTO IGLESIA METODISTA OVERGROWN AND UNREPAIRED

In the early 1990s, when we were arranging transit of the Panama Canal aboard Arion , it was indicated that we should take a taxi between stops, especially when ferrying funds from the bank. I got the feeling that I’d be mugged if my feet even touched the ground! When I ventured into the market for veggies, stashing my money in my bra as I did so, a local woman told me ‘you put your money in there honey, and they just stick their hand in and take it back out.’ Doug took to carrying his knob-headed walking stick when we went to town, and an older gent passing on the street told him ‘yes, you carry that stick and good, you hit them on the head if they bother you.’ We had a friend whose purse was snatched from beneath the partition while she was on the toilet!

We were even scammed in Colon (this story has never been told, due to extreme embarrassment), by a man who told us he could get us beer ‘off the truck’ at half price, but that we had to pay the driver in advance. Dreaming of drinking those three (cheap) cases of warm Budweiser in mid-Pacific, we were eager to pay, but for some reason, our guy never showed.

At the time, crime was blamed on the very recent Operation Just Cause, the US military operation that overthrew Manuel Noriega, the military dictator who ran the country from 1983 to 1989. Popular wisdom indicated that there were a lot of loose guns on the street which had trickled down into, or maybe just consolidated the strength of, a criminal element.

But I gather from recent readings (The Canal Builders, by Julie Greene) that Colon has always been a sort of lawless place. Certainly an early 20th century ‘frontier town’ full of men imported from all over the globe as labor for Canal construction, used hard and put away wet, wouldn’t produce much else. The proverbial drunken sailor temporarily off his anchored ship isn’t a noted law-abider either, nor are those who ‘service’ him.

PHOTO PASTEL FADED PAINT AND TIN ROOF

It’s still hard to find anyone to say anything nice about Colon, except, now, me. From my vantage point anchored near town, off the Club Nautico. I am rather enjoying myself here. While we haven’t been out at night, and actually haven’t walked around much either, and occasionally have seen some pretty rough characters on the street, mainly what Colon looks like is a bustling Central American city, a watered-down Havana, or La Ceiba, Honduras. It has the advantage of good bones, since so much of it looks built to US standards back in the ‘sturdy’ era.

PHOTO COLON STREET TAXIS 3STORY BUILDINGS POWER LINES

One of our taxi drivers showed us around; this park was a highlight, but, despite living across the street as a kid, he couldn’t remember which politicians these were (all white, though!) Several buildings in the vicinity had been restored as apartments by the government and were being offered for rent. Pay for 20 years, and it’s yours forever.

PHOTO POLITICIAN BUSTS IN PARK

Colon/Cristobal may not always be a ‘garden spot’ but its central median ‘parque’ continues down the length of the main road, until it runs into an ordinary, undistinguished, more traffic, shopping center zone.

We always asked (or tried to) our taxi drivers about the security situation. Several drivers told us there had been no problems whatsoever in Noriega’s times; they seemed to yearn for the peace of the dictator. One man blamed TV for changing the expectations of Panama’s youth, for the worse; I can see how he might think that. Personally, I had the idea that the drivers weren’t too worried about their own safety, beyond some precautions about who they pick up at night; professionally, of course, they think people like us should always take taxis, and for the dollar or two most rides cost for door to door service, air conditioning, a chat and some local knowledge, I tend to agree.

It’s a town which, no matter what low-life element it possesses, is also full of normal people (you and I, I was going to say) just trying to raise their kids, keep a roof over their head, a cell phone in their ear, and some fashionable shoes or shirts on their bodies. People bustle about, chat, shop, sweep the streets, do their work. The people who sell lottery tickets, umbrellas, watch batteries, and bits of candy on the street greet each other like old friends at a club meeting. Women and girls walk alone on the street, with purses. People are happy to help us if we ask, but otherwise leave us alone. It just doesn’t feel like a scary place, at least where we’ve been, downtown. Just, as usual, everybody doing the best they can.

One thing that makes me feel better is evidence of a public relations campaign manifested by dozens of street signs

PHOTO PARQUE CENTRAL TOURIST SIGN AT MARKET

like this one: On the Tourist Depends Your Future and That of Colon. Take Care of Them(/it?)

Others say: More Tourism, More Richness; The Tourist Appreciates What You Offer; Offer Your Best Smile to the Tourists.

PHOTO TOURIST SIGN AND STREET LIFE

The Colon 2000 sign refers to a shopping center that was built as a cruise ship destination, not far from the Club Nautico. It has a casino, but is otherwise just a small local-style shopping center; hard to see that being a big draw. But the Canal, the jungle out by Fort Sherman, Fort Lorenzo at the mouth of the Rio Chagres, all are on the cruise ship bus tours. And the tourists in their ‘yachtie’ form hit the big supermarkets and hardware stores like deprived junkies after their months in the San Blas, as they may have been. We ourselves were thrilled to see peanut butter, and kosher salt, and now Doug owns 3000 FLAT toothpicks.

There is also a huge (2500+ merchants and acres of warehouses) duty free zone in Colon. But before you reach for your wallet, know that it’s not really for the likes of us, and nothing like the duty free tourist centers of the eastern Caribbean. It’s meant mainly for the wholesale merchants of South and Central America to procure the goods from all the containers that pass through Panama. Want to buy thousands of caps? Here’s the motherlode, Casa de Gorras.

PHOTO SHOP WINDOW CASA DE GORRAS

No, the real reason I’m presently smitten by Colon has mainly to do with the downtown market. It’s a hive of activity, full of life and happening, vegetables and meat. The few blocks around it which I’ve also wandered are a real hodge-podge of goods, much of it Chinese, as are many of the merchants. You’d have to be really motivated, and optimistic, to want to dig through some of the stuff for sale on the streets. But I love the market and the friendly people therein.

Here are some photos. I know that some of them, being fuzzy, are only worth maybe 250 words, but think of the scribing they still save me!

TEN PHOTOS MARKET SCENES

And there are more photos here.

Technorati Tags: Colon,market

http://galivant.smugmug.com/Panama/Colon/18840275_d8rvb6/ I hope the captions made it; if not, I’ll be working on it, manana.

Bocas del Toro, Panama

2011-08-18T21:30:00.002-06:00

If, like me, you didn’t quite know where Bocas del Toro was, you’d soon find out. According to the SSB radio realm of the Southwest Caribbean Net, Bocas is the West pole of the universe, Cartagena being the East, and the San Blas starring as the Shangri La of the tropics. Where is Bocas and why are so many people going there?

Eyes top left!

Map copied from the blog peaceinpanama.blogspot.com, by a Peace Corps volunteer in the Bocas area, nice-sounding woman, as I find generally of Peace Corps workers, and worth a look.

this map courtesy of escapethatcube.com. If this were a chart, you would see that the water depths are surprisingly inconsistent; the water is often clear, but the bottom holds many surprising contours.

Bocas del Toro is the indented bay and its half-dozen neighboring big islands at the far western end of Caribbean Panama, abutting the border to Costa Rica. The Bocas del Toro province itself extends halfway to the Pacific; the mountainous interior is populated, if at all, largely by Ngobe Indians in an often subsistence condition. Bananas are the primary export of the coastal mainland part of the province. Once they were the economic mainstay of the islands too, but diseases crashed the crop years ago and nowadays the economy is mainly tourist-based. C. Columbus was here on his fourth and final trip and named a few more things. Bocas del Toro lies 130 miles mas o minus, from the Rio Chagres, basically due west.

Bocas the Town is on Isla Colon. The mainland hub, such as it is, of these islands, is Almirante, a twenty-minute lancha ride away. A car ferry like you’d see in the Outer Banks of North Carolina also arrives every morning laden with delivery trucks which do their business then depart every afternoon.

There’s another town, Chiriqui Grande, in the next bay south, and you could also arrive in Almirante by bus from the Costa Rica border at Changuinola. Otherwise, there are a few planes from Panama City which land at the Bocas airport, just a short stroll from the waterfront. The other islands are accessible only by water taxi, lancha or private boat.

So, what’s this place all about? To me it looks like Bocas del Toro is Shorthand for: don’t worry about hurricanes, or, really, any weather beyond rain. Be a gringo in the bosom of your tribe. Eat in restaurants! Drink wine and eat fresh vegetables every day! Wash your clothes in automatic washing machines! Ride a bicycle if you’d care to! Test your powers against the persistence of mildew and no-see-ums. Plug into shore power if that’s your wish. Get on an airplane connecting to anywhere! Watch the rest of the careworn world from a respectable distance.

PHOTO HARBOR VIEW OF COASTAL MOUNTAINS

Many of the turistas are backpackers, big hairy guys and tiny little girls both laboring under the same-sized packs.

Surfers come here – not too many in this rainy season (US summer but the Panamanians call it invierno winter) when the trade-wind generated waves don’t pile up on the reefs and beaches so much. But it’s fun to read the surfer descriptions of the area. Apparently you need to be ‘confident’ because a couple of the best breaks end on top of a reef which I’m sure could scrape you up pretty badly.Bocas Del Toro Surfing – Isla Colon – BLuff and Paunch

Bocas is the kind of town where the main street contains more pedestrians and cyclists than cars and you can easily stroll the six or seven blocks of its length down either lane of the street, without dodging anything but a backpacker, bicycle or chat group. The bikes are generally fat-tired ‘beach’ bikes – we always think of them as luxury rides compared to our little boat bikes.

But we did get those out for a few rambles, including one up and down and up and down across the middle of Isla Colon. There it’s sometimes lush and untouched, and in other places cleared for cattle, pretty in a rolling Pennsylvania Dutch kind of way, minus the barns. Signage indicates something in the law permitting ‘reforestation projects’, one of which might be the increasingly-popular teak tree plantation we saw.http://www.panama-guide.com/article.php/20041121094452818

PHOTO BIG TREE HANGING VINES

Yachts have been coming here in ever -increasing numbers – but as we’ve found in the Rio Dulce, Guatemala and other places, often the boats are parked and empty while the owners have flown back to Europe or the US for a few months. There are three marinas in the Bocas area, and rumors are flying about a soon-to-be-contructed haulout facility in Almirante. This, if true, would really change the cruising equation; the nearest haulout otherwise is back in Colon at Shelter Bay, with a reputation of being pricey and prickly in some of its policies. The other alternative, Cartagena, is hundreds of up-wind miles away.

Bocas has a number of old houses converted to hostels, and a handful of modern ones too, lots of bars and restaurants, a surprising number of Chinese-owned grocery stores. You can buy computer parts at the pharmacy, and motor oil at almost any grocery.You can get a massage, a tattoo and who knows what else where else. To my mind, if the cornucopia that is Chow Kai Ferreteria doesn’t have it, I don’t need it!

PHOTO WATER TAXIS

Being a tourist town, and a group of islands, prices are a little higher than other places in Panama. The locals who profit from the present invasion are probably pleased by increasing ‘gentrification’ but in the background, or sometimes right next door, is a basically rural, undereducated, poor indigenous population who might not do so well.

PHOTO

The slow global economy may be delaying development just now but in the meantime the Panamanian government is actively encouraging US and European investors to settle in Panama if they have a certain monthly income or other resources. I’ve been told it is an effort to replace some of the ‘economic stimulus’ that disappeared when the US population of the Canal Zone left twenty years ago. And the newcomers are not all old people either – we’ve met a few young couples living in Bocas and Boquete (inland, another post)who work via the Internet, or start restaurants and other small businesses.

One hotel displays photos from over a century ago, when the Bocas area was prime banana growing territory. Every time I see old photos like this, I wonder where the trees are.

PHOTO OLD BOCAS FRUIT CO HQ

The bulk of banana plantation activity has moved to the mainland, but Bocas town still has a few of the older buildings, despite fire, storm, earthquake and development, including some charming raised up wooden cottages with porches and gingerbread, now often serving as backpacker hostels.

PHOTO OLD WOODEN HOUSE

The surrounding islands have varied personalities. Solarte seems to attract the jungle-loving new arrivals. Bastiamento, has a small town, Old Bank, the newest marina, Red Frog, a good surfing beach, and a national park. We had a great hike out there one day (another post). Others have jungle, some specialized production, like gourmet chocolate (I’m practically addicted to one of the locally manufactured brands), or have been substantially cleared for low level cattle production.

All in all, until the great tourist boom comes, it’s active but not frantic around here, at least not in the rainy season.

If you’re reading between the lines, you might discern that I sort of like it, and I sort of don’t. We look at the number of gringos in their new ‘tropical estates’ with a mix of emotions. How can they commit to this? The bottom line, for those we’ve been able to ask, is that their money goes farther here, they think. But I keep wondering: How can they build a wooden house on a low-lying island, often cheek by jowl with some other self-important ex-pat, or next to a poor native village, in a country where they don’t speak the language and don’t understand the work ethic, where they often don't have much nice to say about the people, even if the hurricanes don’t come here and the internet service can be good?

Of course, there is way more to Bocas del Toro than the little I’ve stumbled through here. We, as usual, have more questions than answers out here in our floating palace.

Clearly, there are advantages to Panama, particularly for the investor (tax concessions and relatively low, although rising, prices),and the retiree: ( ‘third age’ discounts, less expensive decent-quality medical care). A stable government and a semi-Westernized culture familiar with US methods and products from generations of American presence in the Canal Zone works for everyone. There’s a lot to like, but is it all that nice? It would be easy to get stuck here, on a lee shore, at the far downwind end of the Caribbean.

Technorati Tags: Bocas del Toro

Rio Chagres

2011-07-10T20:46:00.002-06:00

When Doug and I wanted a place to hang out in peace and quiet for a little while after the bustle of Colon, we thought –let’s try the Chagres! It’s a river (fresh water!) running through a jungle, with not too difficult an entry in the right conditions, just around the corner from Colon and all its associated activity, Panama Canal, and otherwise. As usual, I liked it hugely. I’d still be there if Doug hadn’t insisted on leaving, and everything we own would be fresh-water clean.

This Google Earth image is pretty choppy, but you can see the Rio Chagres outlined in blue and running diagonally across the page. Maybe it looks better on a decent-sized monitor? The mouth of the river and Fort San Lorenzo are top left, the dam and spillway and lake at bottom right, near the set of three locks. Just off the top center of the image is Shelter Bay Marina and off top right, the main breakwater for the canal anchorage. From the old map (courtesy of inadiscover.com) you can see what they had to work with in the beginning. Reminds me a little of some of our charts, especially the typeface.

gGOOGLE EARTH, HISTORIC MAP

When the Panama Canal was built, it was this river that was dammed to enlarge Gatun Lake and ease the transition up ?85 feet? from the Caribbean side. In fact, I’ve read that Chagres is the only river with outlets on both oceans, although I think that’s counting using the other set of locks as egress. It was the major highway for the Spanish conquistadors moving their treasure from the Pacific side to the Atlantic. When Henry Morgan the pirate went to Panama City to raid Spanish coffers, it was the Rio Chagres that he used as a highway. Later on it was something of a short-cut for those seeking, and returning from, the California Gold Rush. I imagine there was a good deal of rowing involved.

Now that we’re here, however, things have calmed down considerably. We entered at Fort Lorenzo and eventually motored all the way up the more=or-less consistent-width channel to almost within sight of the Gatun Lake spillway, about six miles away, 30 or 40 feet deep all the way. During our entire stay we saw one handful of local fishing boats and pangas, two yachts up at the end, a fast-flying flotilla of military persons, 2 men on a trail, and that was it – way more monkeys than people inhabit the river I saw. It’s all protected park land; if you can believe what you read online it is protected because they need to conserve as much as possible of the 200+ inches of annual rainfall for lock operation. They’ve learned that water just runs off from the developed land. The new canal, by the way, is being cleverly engineered to conserve its water; a good thing, because every locking of the present canal uses 52 million gallons. Or something like that!

Here’s how the Rio Chagres looks from the fort, San Lorenzo, which the Spanish last re-built around 1750, to protect the treasures it was attempting to remove from the continent. The US fortified it during World War II to protect the Canal. These days it’s just the usual semi-inscrutable collection of cannons and ruins, weed-whacked to blankness. We pedalled up here from Shelter Bay Marina on our bicycles one morning and later had a joyride downhill toward home, plus howler monkeys, frogs spawning in puddles, free ice-cold water from a cruise-ship tour bus, and a little overheard rifle-range practice. This land was once, (?from the 1950s?)in the US era, and apparently still is, used for jungle combat training.

PHOTO LOOKING UPRIVER FROM THE FORT

To the left, there’s a dock with road access, popular with fishers. Partway upstream, and well inland, you can (with super zoom, maybe) see the top ‘bar’ of a big crane, which is said to be part of the Smithsonian’s jungle canopy research project. Too bad we couldn’t figure out how to get there by foot. From the river the bushwhacking required looked very intense, even if you could keep track of where you were and were going. (no GPS satellites pierce the vegetation)

Although, I gather that once you find the rainforest proper, the understory is actually clear, even airy, with the bulk of the activity in the canopy. This from a book I’m reading and enjoying, Tropical Nature by Adrian Forsythe, available in Kindle format, and recommended for anyone near Central American tropical forests.

We anchored near the fishing dock for a few hours. Doug wanted to check out the wreck on the beach just outside the river mouth.

PHOTO REMAINS OF CIELO ON BEACH

This wreck dates from December 2010. There was so much rain here at the end of the rainy season that the Panama Canal was actually closed to traffic for a day or so, for the first time ever, I gather because of the amount of vegetation in the water. (By comparison, this pleasant little rain shower wasn’t even a drop in the bucket, but the monkeys always howl when they start to get wet.)

RIO CHAGRES RAIN FOREST IN RAIN

The Canal Authority sometimes lets excess water out the spillway, first sounding a siren to warn the fishermen who congregate on the rocks and shoals immediately downstream. This wrecked boat wasn’t flushed all the way downstream by spillway water, but I gather he was either anchored or trying to anchor at the mouth and just couldn’t withstand the forces against him. Doug took a few tools just in case, but the boat has been neatly but very thoroughly stripped.

We spent a couple very pleasant days where the river makes a ninety-degree turn and we could have views in both directions.

RIO CHAGRES DOWNSTREAM VIEW

By dinghy we explored several little streams that meandered in from somewhere, looking for the one with the waterfall, but the pleasure of that was in the search, not in the realization.

CREEK BUTTRESS ROOTS

This corner was popular with cicadas and/or frogs (hard to know what we were listening too, but it lasted all day!), howler monkeys and shrieking lorikeets; very occasionally we could hear a discordant ship’s horn from the lock or lake a couple miles off.

HOWLER MONKEYS IN BREADFRUIT TREE

Needing to make a parts order we eventually went up to the end of the river ourselves, where there were two other yachts in residence. Having heard of theft issues at the little public landing, we rowed the inflatable there, and we did notice that no one left motors on their boats, and that the boats themselves were heavily chained and locked. So the dangers of the rainforest seem primarily human. Also, from the end of the river the soundscape was a little less ‘jungly’ and more along the lines of very occasional dumptruck tailgates bouncing and buses without mufflers, plus there was the sodium vapor loom of the lights of the Gatun lock.

GATUN SPILLWAY DAM CONTAINER SHIP REPAIR BARGE HIGHWAY BRIDGE ROCKS

However from the dam end of the river we could have taken a bus back to Colon, only a few miles away, for supplies! And I actually did communicate with the outside world briefly: I sat near the side of the road (actually, in the parking lot of the defunct Tarpon Restaurant – there are tarpon in this river too – we saw scales as big as my palm in some fishing places). My laptop was on my knees and the cell phone modem dangled from a branch, with the two bars of service I needed to order some boat stuff for ocean shipment from Florida to Panama City. I’m still giddy at being able to do this, but need to remember to check for ants before sitting or leaning on anything! And I apologize to anyone whose email I should have answered right then and there…it was the ants!

No swimming because of the one crocodile I saw one time, but it was BIG. When the climate got hot and breezeless, Doug poured buckets of water on himself; I have a big sponge for controlled dribble.

We went for a hike on a trail that turned out to be the remains of a railway built by the French at the end of the 1800s in their unsuccessful canal-building attempt. It was level and may have gone all the way back to the river mouth, but we didn’t go that far, thinking we’d be unlikely to notice any difference in landscape between here and there. There was plenty to gawk at already!

My ongoing reorganization scheme will eventually lead to some online albums, but for now, I’ve got to get caught up with places we left a month or more ago!

Where the Water Meets the Road

2011-06-30T13:57:00.001-06:00

One of the great pleasures of Kuna Yala, these islands along the Panamanian coast otherwise known as the San Blas, is that STUFF isn’t just pouring in, dumped out of the huge container ships constantly streaming past just over the horizon, en route to the Panama Canal. Even if, sometimes, it looks like the containers themselves are pouring in, I only saw this one.

This container on the beach, washed up not too long ago at Esnasdup illustrates a previous point that containers really DO sometimes get away from their ships. PHOTO ESNASDUP CONTAINER .

It passed over a small reef and scraped, surprisingly lightly, through the shallows before it landed here. The copper pipe and refrigeration system is gone, and so is the insulation, scraped away for access to the pipe and then removed by ‘aeolian transport’ (wind). The roof is gone too, as if by a P38 can opener, otherwise, the container would be ripe for colonization. Contents? History? Mystery!

Life is close to the bone, or rather, to the vine, to the tree, to the reef, for the resident Kuna people. There isn’t much in the way of the manufactured goods, or the money to pay for them, here. Of the things seen in use and for sale in the tiendas, much of which is either Chinese, or sugar-based, my question has always been “where does it come from? How does it get here?”

Well, now we know a little. Many goods flow in in pickup trucks and jeeps to Carti on the one road that penetrates the Comarca of Kuna Yala from Panama. On a good day, according to some campers we met on an outer island, they can get to Carti from Panama City (which is on the Pacific coast of the isthmus) in ‘just a couple hours’ on a road that is properly paved, down to the yellow line down the middle. The campers came in their own car, probably paid some “Kuna tax’ for using the landing, or the road?, but the Kuna collectively also own a number of jeeps, which ferry goods and people from the city.

This part of the road looks good, but further along it is subject to landslides and other degradation in heavy rains. The terminus is on what used to be the runway of the Carti airport.

The airport no longer operates; the road does a better job of what the airport once did. I’ll also mention that the dozen or so small airports that dot the coast seem to have been built by the US during WWII, part of its canal protection scheme. Anyhow, I’m a little unclear about all the details of the road, save that it can be done.

PHOTO PICKUP TRUCK BEING UNLOADED

So we sat in the shade and watched the various loadings and unloadings taking place along the beach.

PHOTO MOTORCYCLE BEING LOADED

Then there were the three gringoes with the two motorcycles at the end of the dock. Since there is no road all the way through the Darien (which is keeping that last bit of rain forest safe for now), they were travelling to Patagonia via Cartagena, and to Cartagena via one of the several so-called ‘backpacker boats’. Fritz the Cat, one of the largest and longest established members of that tribe, straps up to five bikes along the side decks for the ?five day trip, (3 meals, less than five hundred dollars, I think). Here’s how the bikes get that far.

I should mention that this spot is open to the prevailing trades and that we were there during relatively settled conditions. Like the local lanchas, we anchored a bit off and waded ashore, not the most elegant way of arriving, but better than being flipped or bounced off the bottom.

There’s another ‘local’ landing, this one a little way up a nearby river and down an unpaved road. Motorized ulus use this one, and here all a lady has to do to exit is step gently but firmly.

PHOTO RIVER LANDING

Laundry Day Two: the river

2011-05-02T06:53:00.001-06:00

A couple weeks later, we had sweated, spotted and stank (or should that be stunk?) up all our clothes, towels and sheets again. The household deities offered clouds and sometimes lightening, but no precipitation. So we decided it was time for a river trip. The pipe that supplies the town, at Nargana, at the Rio Diablo, has apparently been broken for some time, so it was easy to follow the trail of ulus full of bottles, jugs and drums into the mouth of the river, between numerous tree trunks and snags, over the 14-18”bar, in to a pleasant lazy river full of fresh water.

So far we’ve seen mostly the islands of the San Blas, their sandy beaches, groves of coconut, or mangrove, their off-lying shoal and reefs, breaking waves etc. This was our first real experience in the mainland. Although we knew that much of the foreshore was cultivated we’d never seen any sign of the activity from the distance, other than what produce people bring us in their ulus, and sometimes, smoke. There were no signs of clear-cutting or slash and burn, or machinery, no chemicals, no fertilizer bags or any other sign of destructive practice.

We went up maybe a mile or two, and it all looked pretty much like this

Every so often there would be a ulu pulled into the driveway of a finca.

It was really impressive how much agriculture was taking place mixed in with the natural habitat. Our friend Arquin who we met back in the eastern San Blas, told us that he had several ‘fincas’ for his various crops. One day he’d go for yucca, one day to another place for bananas. So, here, it would be coconuts, bananas, mango, maybe papaya, and a plant I remember as dalo from the Pacific, but haven’t seen in the markets here – not ready yet? And plenty I don’t recognize.

Finally it started to get too snagged, barred and shallowed, so we stopped on a stony shoal and waited to see what would happen next.

An ulu came along. We asked if this were a good place for washing. Here yes, there no, he told us. Beyond this point, he said, the river was for drinking water, and there was a ‘molto’ fine for washing there. Then he offered us some mangoes. Thanks to the secret rule “when you leave the boat, always take shoes, always take money”, we were able to accept with pleasure, and one Balboa!

Soon we were in a regular laundromat.

The little boy was very happy to yell ‘hola’ at us every once a while, but not so happy as I was to see him giggle as we ‘hola’-ed back.

We also met two sets of people who were collecting mud from the river bank near here. Those Spanish lessons may be paying off: we think this mud is a special curative for pain in the knee joint. You slather it on before you got to bed at night, wrap it in a cloth, and in the morning your aches will be diminished. Would that we were able to distinguish the good mud from the other mud, as the two gents could do! The only word they could think of to describe this particular mud was ‘suave’, soft.

Doug was assigned agitation duty but sometimes got distracted by the passing scene.

Fresh water! Flowing for minutes through my towels and sheets – what a treat! Then we soaked ourselves neck-deep for about half an hour, bird song abounding and bird flashes of color throughout the canopy for extra entertainment. Note to self, next time bring binoculars.

We had puttered slowly upstream via outboard, but decided to paddle downstream. An ulu with an outboard inquired if we had run out of gas. No, I said, ‘esta es mas tranquilo’ was an answer they appreciated.

Actually we’d hoped to drift, but there was enough headwind to stall the inflatable. We stayed right behind and at an equal pace

with this ulu, dad and the kids chattering away, until we took a little detour to look at a few things, like these pendulous bird nests under the flowers, birds there too with bright yellow rumps, but not for this photo.

And there were several family burial spots too; no others as elaborate as this one (many houses aren’t this well equipped), but the principle is the same, a roof, a chair or hammock and a collection of other goods th

at might be useful to the deceased as s/he makes their way in the next worlds – we’ve seen coffee mugs and cookware, baskets or crates, etc . This one looks like there’s a little Catholic mixed in.

Then of course we/I had to hang all this stuff to flap dry in the boat’s rigging – ran out of clothespins - fold and store it and remake the beds. All that was a very small price to pay for a most pleasant day in Kuna Yala.

Laundry Day - rainy

2011-04-29T21:34:00.001-06:00

On the first day of meaningful daytime rain in months, I got out my buckets and adjusted the cockpit awning to catch as much water as the sky would give my six square yards of catchment, and got ready for a rewarding laundry experience. I blocked up the deck drains and used the starboard side as pre-wash, port for extra rinse. I have a few 5-gallon plastic buckets, one for catching, one for washing, one for rinsing, and I have a dedicated toilet plunger for ‘jet action cleaning’ .

I don’t mind admitting that I kind of enjoy the challenge of orchestrating all the variables. How many clothes? How dirty? Bleachable? Is the rinse water too dirty for washing yet? Should I soap this spot, or scrub it, or see if I can forget I ever saw it? What’s the best way to scrub a spot? Is it better to churn things in the rinse water, or can they just be dipped a few times? Where is the sweet spot called ‘clean enough under the circumstances’ ? Have I used my left arm as much as my right? And how ‘bout those ‘wringing out’ muscles! The warm, steady, gentle showers lasted a good hour, and then there was sun and a little breeze for drying. The household deities were with me that day, at least through the underwear and the T-shirts and kitchen towels.

When the showers were over and I got a real chance to look around, I realized that of the seven boats in the anchorage, six of whom were French, I was the only one who was doing laundry. Did they all have so much water they could afford to waste this manna from heaven?

Then I got to really look around and learned why.

What’s to wash?

Shopping in San Blas

2011-04-26T22:58:00.005-06:00

We did a lot of grocery shopping before we left Cartagena. Seemed like every day I was off to some different store or market, wandering dazedly around reading the shelves, wondering what I’d find, and what I’d need. I stuffed the bilges, stuffed the lockers, filled all my canning jars. It was a relief to leave town, and not have to do that any more.

Since then, it’s been a gradual eating down through the layers. After two and a half months, we are beginning to run out of things, despite being able to pick up a few bits and pieces along the way. There are small tiendas in small pueblos, but what they stock is pretty hit and miss, and aimed at people who buy a little every day; a pound of rice, a can of corned beef, some oil or rice, to supplement what comes from a tree or from the sea. I was going to say we too are eating pretty low on the food chain. But the food chain at the tiendas runs along the low lines of powdered milk and Tang, so that’s part of our diet now too. Yum!

Something in me says that a picture that needs to be explained needs to be deleted, but I like this picture. The big black object in front is a phone/fax, but there is no headset, no service, and probably no future.{why it's there? Works as a calculator!} Still, we stand over the counter and peer fuzzily at whatever might be back there. I always try to buy something, but sometimes it’s hard.

Here I got potatoes and sewing thread.

The baker’s bread is ready at 3pm, if the water pipe isn’t broken. (The pipe brings water from the river to the town, Nargana, on the island but it seems to be always under repair. And the yachts are sometimes to blame, for not registering what that pair of little buoys, perhaps the only buoys in the archipelago, signifies. ) The baker is a nice man and pretends to understand us, but I think he speaks only Kuna. I’ve needed, and kneaded, a lot of my own bread recently; we either have plenty of bread, or none, on board.

In addition to fuel for the body, there’s fuel for the boat, mainly the outboard. Here, we siphoned from the drum through a rag into a plastic gallon jug, then poured into our jerry can. The man had the same siphon-starter that I use.

There even is a place in Nargana that sells what they call in the Eastern Caribbean ‘spiritous liquors’, Balboa beer, box wine, Abuela rum (my abuela/granny would have liked it!) !) [OOPs, checking the label I see that’s Abuelo the masculine),and vodka is what I saw. But fellow cruisers reported one day last week that the staff didn’t want to sell any of it; they were having a fiesta and hoped to keep it for themselves. Given the problems of the supply chain – everything comes in by lancha from ?50 miles away, weather-dependent, it must be hard to have people like us around, who drop in from outer space, and buy up everything in bulk, so that we can stay in the cays without coming to town. One day recently, a lancha arrived carrying Digicel sim cards for the phone and Internet modem (hence these photos can be posted, I hope). I hurriedly bought all three of them, (for a friend too) and then tiptoed away in case one of the locals also wanted one.

The reason we haven’t started gnawing the running rigging (maybe I could get my salt there!) is because we are regularly visited by cayugos with something to sell. The season is closed for March, April and May on langousta (lobster), crab, and octopus, and may be closed longer than that for conch, so although we’re offered langousta regularly we decline. But when the man holds up a fish we reel him in. For a Balboa aka a greenback dollar, or two or three, we are getting the nicest freshest fish, cleaned on the spot and often in the pan within the hour. We’ve had some pretty good fish-head soup recently too.

Despite the prohibitions, there is still plenty of fishing for the ‘forbidden’; they said this pile of conch was special for Semana Santa.

The main, probably the only, agricultural product of the offshore islands, is coconut. Every tree, and there may be millions, is owned, and woe unto the cruiser who helps him/herself to a coconut. Why would you, when you can buy them already husked for a quarter?

The trading boats from Colombia are the main buyers of coconuts. They take them back to Colombia for use in lots of food and industrial products. The farther west we travel in the archipelago, the fewer trading boats we see, although they seemed plentiful closer to Colombia. I would not want to travel more than about five miles on one of these boats. For some reason, there seem to be no Panamanian supply boats of this type. But something significant happens where the road meets the water, and I'll know more about the supply chain when we get that far.

This is the trading vessel Jenny at Corazon de Jesus, which as the TV antennas may indicate, is one of the non-traditional villages. I’ve been trying to find out about the programming, but so far have only been told that it is ‘Christian’.

The veggie boat is the best boat of all. It comes somewhat sporadically to several anchorages in the more populated area around the Lemons and Holandaise cays, usually on Thursday or Friday. They have top quality stuff, at least on day one, and it’s reasonably priced – especially considering the convenience factor. I think I paid $17.50 for this assortment, plus some onions not in the picture.The VHF crackles with the announcements 'the veggie boat is in the West Lemons, planning to get to the Holandaise today.' We're like kiddies tracking Santa's sleigh.

We (I) have easily spent more buying molas (mola, a word in Kuna for blouse, has come to refer to the intricately cut and sewn layered fabric panels on the blouses) from women like these than we have spent on groceries since we left Cartagena.

Here’s my nicest purchase: the food triangle is not exactly a traditional design, but somehow it spoke to me anyhow.

Ears on the World

2011-04-03T20:32:00.002-06:00

We form much of our world view via input into the two ear holes in the sides of our heads. Through them we funnel random and indiscriminate palaver broadcast from our VHF and Single Side Band radios dials. On the Armed Forces Radio Network, we can hear parts of All Things Considered, so we have a date there most every day at 4PM.

I was sitting at the computer hoping for any internet at all via a new Digicel SIM card and the first cell tower we’ve seen in weeks. A program came on about a new movement of Slow (Inter)Netters. These are people who revel in the pleasures of Internet connection at 14.4 dial-up speeds. This is about the speed I’ve been dealing with a lot in Colombia, so they had my attention.

What is there to like about a slow internet? The meditative rate at which the screen loads, matching the optimum rate of human thought, the slower pulse rate, the savorable perception of time, according to one study. I forget the rest, except for the mention of a lead-lined coffee shop where no smartphone could intrude. I was aghast, but I tried hard to to see the Zen of this point of view, because I need the Zen of it.

Slow food? Of course, whenever possible. We certainly participate in the slow boat work movement. I hand-sand varnished trim and enjoy watching the golden-eyed low spots disappear beneath 220-grit paper. We tootle merrily along at 4 knots when much of the world does 70 or more. But didn’t these Slow people realize what a blessing, what a gift, a zippy internet connection is? Why un-invent the wheel? Personally, my heart rate goes up as the internet speed goes down, and the time I have wasted doesn’t bear thinking about. The only benefit to me of being an involuntary Slow-Netter is that I sometimes practice chord shapes and strums on my ukulele as I wait.

I was really challenged to think anyone would voluntarily subject themselves to the curse of a sputtering, underpowered internet. It wasn’t until my head hit the pillow late that night that I suddenly realized I’d been had; April Fool-ed. Good one, National Public Radio!

Also heard on the radio – the local SSB net - was the comment that vessels should skip the Vivorillos Cays – a sprinkling of islands not far from Cabo Gracias a Dios where you’d turn to head to or from Honduras and Guatemala from Panama. The report (second-hand) was that the flies there were intolerable due to a shark slaughter that had taken place. There’s a lot of unsupervised activity including fishing, on those banks, I thought just for shrimp and conch. But that season is supposedly closed for March, April and May. So if the fly report is true, shark is the new target. Conservation efforts aren’t having much impact here.

Laura Dekker, the young (16?) Dutch girl who is trying to set a circumnavigation record, passed through the San Blas recently. We overheard a conversation wherein someone tried to fix her up with a bunch of TV and print reporters, in Colon. I was impressed to hear her say “That’s not part of my plan.” I wish I’d been that focused at that age. Ah, but when I had a chance I looked at her website and learned she hadn’t been able to avoid the interviewers after all. http://www.lauradekker.nl/English/News.html

And, I’d like to also mention that we listen to the ambient soundscape – surf, breeze, very occasional birds, the whistle or ‘hola’ of an approaching cayuga. We listen to each other, and to silence, at times. Sometimes the radio is just too much!

Hasta la vista, Colombia, posted via Airmail

2011-03-31T03:11:00.001-06:00

Depending on how you do it, it's an overnight trip from Cartagena to the San Blas islands which are sprinkled along Panama’s Caribbean coast. As an almost 200-mile straight shot,it's usually a fast trip on the rhumbline, tradewinds generally strong at your back. The problem, sometimes, are the short, steep (2-3 meter ) seas that have been building underneath those trades. And, of course, keeping in mind the chart notation "unsurveyed", you need daylight to see the numerous reefs and shoals on the approach.

We took an alternate route, coast-hopping thru a series of small islands off the coast of southwestern Colombia. The Bay of Cholon behind Isla Baru twenty miles south of Cartagena is a fine and commodious anchorage, and a haven for wealthy Colombians. Baru also has a beautiful stretch of beach being eyed by developers. Across the island the pueblo of Baru is something different, a ramshackle, dirt-floored town that must be a bog in the rainy season.

Eventually we moved on to the Rosarios, where there's a very interesting private aviary. The resident veterinarian told us many of the birds had been confiscated from bird traffickers. I was really impressed by the care taken. Otherwise, there were a surprising number of roofless, abandoned houses, which made us wonder if there had ever been a hurricane in this 'hurricane-free' latitude. There's also an aquarium that is the daytrip destination of many Cartagena tourists and cruise ship passengers.

The Islas San Bernardos have a resort on one island, and a tiny crowded island nearby where everyone lives, and a big mainly empty island that we anchored behind. We also spent a night behind Cabo San Bernardo, where there was surprisingly little activity of any kind. We did get a late evening visit and inspection from a stealthy Colombian Coast Guard boat, which was at first very unsettling, but upon further reflection, it was nice to know they were out there. Just another reminder of all that goes on beyond us.

At Isla Fuerte, we spent an extra day criss-crossing its shady paths trying not too hard to figure out what required armed soldiers on the waterfront, and more Coast Guard activity. Maybe it had to do with a hydrographic ship anchored on the back side of the island. Fuerte seemed a nice small place despite the rolly anchorage. The local joke was that there were more burros than people. I don't think that was true, but there were lots of burros, carrying buckets of water from the well, coral blocks for building from the beach, bunches of plantains or bags of coconuts from the hinterland. We were offered a plot of land 'muy barato' where we could build a refuge from the Estados Unidos, which our new friend would look after in our absence from the comfort of his hammock.

The next afternoon we left, planning for a morning arrival on the mainland. If there's life in this belly of ocean, we didn't see it, which is good because, although the Colombia we saw is an impressive country in many respects, there are still hostage-takers and drug-runners, political unrest and corruption, all of which find their way into coastal waters, at least according to Jackline Insurance.

Our landfall was Puerto Escoses, Panama, 8-49 degrees N and 77-37 W. Ghosts live here. Some hang out in the empty Kuna Indian houses halfway down the bay, perhaps waiting for the next planting season or coconut harvest. The others are several thousand Scotsmen (and women, I assume), who attempted to settle here back in 1690. What were they thinking?

Just as we were thinking we had the place to ourselves, a cayuga eased over the bar of a small river hidden in the mangroves. Two Kuna boys and a man not Kuna approached us wanting to know our particulars, why we had not gone to the official port of Obaldia (an open roadstead) and, most particularly, where was our Panamanian flag? In fact we were picking through our bag of flags trying to remember which quartered red/white/blue with star flag represented Panama, and which side went up. As he left he told us we were lucky he was not in his official boat, and that he could not give us permission to explore the river as it was not his jurisdiction. The two crocodiles that swam past the boat later on, as the sun went down, my length although not my beam, made me glad I'd stayed in the boat all day. So, welcome to Panama.

Club Nautico Cartagena

2011-03-05T05:26:00.005-06:00

Photo by Felix Malo, December 2009, taken from a highrise in Boca Grande. The district of Manga where Club Nautico is, is in the foreground. Backdrop is La Popa, with a monastery atop it. Between the two is the district called Pie de la Popa, where there is much traffic and commercial activity.

The anchorage at Cartagena is capacious; I’d guess there are well over 50 boats there now, over 100 during the holiday season, maybe more. If there ever were a city in need of a decent marine facility, it’s Cartagena.

Actually, it has one: Club de Pesca looks terrific, present repairs not withstanding, but it is perpetually full of the nicer local boats and has a waiting list of years for the visitor.

Then there’s the Club Nautico. They say it once had a restaurant, showers and other facilities. Then it was set to be renovated. Now it is what you see here, in limbo. There’s a complicated story of feuds and lawsuits; the demolition is nearly complete but for whatever reason there is no reconstruction on shore. There are still slips, and water, and electric, and docks ‘with character’. The most salient feature for the visiting boater anchored out is the dinghy dock, and sometimes, access to a water spigot, a place to put trash, and a very helpful dockmaster, John, who is probably starting to feel like a polar bear whose floe is melting.

And there’s more. Lots of worlds intersect on this patched concrete slab on the waterfront.The women who sell fruit are often there. All the day workers congregate, ready to paint or polish or repair. Backpackers arrive in groups looking for boats to the San Blas. Others look for shade, and the Internet. The customs and clearance agents hold court. Things are hauled up and down the dock.Usually there’s a boat repair project or three off to the side. There’s a big TV, so if there’s football there’s a gathering. A man with an eye patch is ready to sell emerald jewelry. The cruisers meet in the evening for happy hour, and if there are children in the fleet, there are scooter races, sword fights, etc.

Outside on the sidewalk you can get a taxi, of course, but also breakfast or lunch, shots of coffee, bags of juice, more fruit including the jumbo-est strawberries I’ve ever seen, and, my personal favorite, raspado, shaved ice, with tamarindo syrup.

This is a perpetually smiling and cheerful man, but when he knew he was going to be photographed and get a copy of the picture he closed his mouth I think to hide his few teeth.

Off to the side there’s space for projects. This fellow’s inflatable dinghy had leaks that couldn’t be repaired, so he built something new from scratch, knocking out this stitch and glue plywood pram, here on its maiden voyage, in about a week, with plenty of peanut gallery supervision.

Sunsetting view towards Boca Grande. You should see what powerful passing wakes can do. It takes a shoehorn, and sometimes a man in the water to deal with underwater moorings, chains and lines, to tie up.

The VHF cruisers net on channel 68 (unless a ship is using that channel to relay docking info) is a wealth of information about where to get things, what’s available, who can do what work, and the eternal favorite, Treasures of the Bilge. The cruising community even has a culture maven who’s up on the latest exhibits of art, theater, films and literary affairs.

So Club Nautico is a pretty good institution in search of facilities to match.If you want to make a fortune (and have one to begin with), build a marina in Cartagena with proper slips and shoreside amenities. The cruisers will come. In fact, they're already here.

Barnacle-bound in Cartagena

2011-02-20T18:52:00.001-06:00

A dirty little secret of Cartagena is the foulness of the water in the harbor; not (generally) in the oily, trashy sense, but in being a ‘hot’ primordial broth of barnacle larvae, and barnacle food (zooplankton and algae). We’ve been here for 47 days, came with a fresh clean bottom painted in November, and now look:

In the first two weeks we wondered what the fuss was about. In the third week things began to happen, but were easy to dismiss. In the fourth week we began to get alarmed.

As the barnacles grew we could actually hear the changes. Wavelets striking the side began to make a sleety, sizzley sound, like surf departing a rocky beach. Drainage thru the galley sink slowed, and the marine toilet began making sucking noises thru the sink.
We had coated the prop and shaft with lanolin, but that wasn’t working any more (if it ever had), as we found when we had to actually move the boat. How the ships of yore ever managed to keep up with the problem I can’t imagine. Careening, and diving, are limited options and even rocket scientists haven’t succeeded at prevention.

The mini-economy at the Club Nautico of Cartagena provided a local specialist to deal with the issue. You want your bottom cleaned? Alberto is the man. He came out to the boat in the anchorage with mask, fins, snorkel, 2 scrapers, and a screwdriver, no scuba tank. An hour or so later, the bottom was clean again.

Long-term residents of the Club Nautico and anchorage have Alberto do their bottoms every three weeks. Longer than that, he says, and the biggest barnacles get their teeth into the bottom paint; then they take the paint with them when they go. Use a scraper, (Alberto uses an 8-inch drywall blade, just as we do), not a brush, or after three or four times there will be no bottom paint left. To clean the anchor chain, don’t poke at every link or you’ll be there for hours. Rather, use the snubber to make a slack catenary* and rub handfuls of chain links with themselves to knock off the barnacles. The screwdriver is for the thru-hulls.

Over drinks at happy hour, someone commented that barnacles were attracted to places where barnacles had already been. The siren scent of barnacle balm? Intrigued by the thought I looked it up, and of course it’s sort of true. There’s a hatching pheromone triggered by algal blooms which cause dormant eggs to be released to form free-swimming larvae. And there’s the dread ‘settlement pheromone’, which attracts other barnacles into the range of the ‘highly extensible’ pseudo-penis which every hermaphroditic barnacle possesses. Yes, one barnacle can reproduce itself, but usually the male stage comes first and roams the neighborhood.#160;

However, where there’s a pheromone, there’s the potential for a targeted anti-pheromone, and it appears that current barnacle-busting hopes are pinned to a chemical, medetomidine, that turns the settlement receptors into a‘don’t settle here’ sign. Barnacles do go where barnacles have been, because they like the surface, so other researchers are trying to design textured barnacle-repelling bottoms for ships. Charles Darwin wrote one of the definitive papers about barnacles, but because of the enormous economic implications for world shipping, there is still a lot of research in the area. Barnacles are positively charismatic compared to, say, Archaeocyatha, a fossilized, extinct tropical sponge. Maybe I've missed my calling, (again).

Barnacles are crustaceans, related to crabs and lobster, not mollusks. They attach with their antenna, using a ‘cement gland’ and stay put (sessile) for the rest of their lives, which can be 3-5 years. They gather passing nutrients with their feet. Had we cared to measure, we could have analyzed more stringently the nature of the harbor water; barnacles can serve as biomarkers because of the amounts of toxic metals they can absorb.

Had enough of barnacles? Me too! In fact, when I was maybe ten, a small red dinghy and I spent a miserable winter weekend together at the top end of a boat shed, with a three-cornered paint scraper and a sheet of sandpaper. My orders were to 'make that bottom clean'. I've just met folks on another boat who pull up and scrub their anchor chain every three days. It's a nuisance to be sure, but it's better, and easier, than arguing with a barnacle.

Wikipedia, and The Environmental Physiology of Animals by Wilmer and Stone were consulted in this gross oversimplification of the life of barnacles. Another interesting website is http://www.fathom.com/feature/121900/index.html

*ten cents' worth about the snubber: we anchor with chain; it's strong, but hasn't much 'give' to it. So we tie or hook a shortish piece of stretchy line, a snubber, from the chain to the deck cleat, to ease some of the chain's loading. Otherwise, when conditions get bouncy, the chain would want to yank the bow off the boat. The catenary is the curved bit of chain that hangs between the two fixed points. Handy to know, 'cadena' is chain in Spanish.

Saturday Night Out in Cartagena

2011-02-13T09:20:00.007-06:00

You’d think we’d do this more often, being convenient to a nice part of a nice city, Cartagena, Colombia . But no, only now that we’re getting ready to leave do we venture forth for an entire evening on the town.
Here, the gathering for sunset-viewing atop the city wall. So much going on I forgot to look for the green flash, not that there would have been hope for one in this humidity.

That's Patty and Tom and Doug, taking it all in. We later ate outside at the fancy restaurant on the square at San Pedro Claver, where we had front row seats to the comings and goings for the 7 PM and 8:30 weddings at the cathedral just opposite, and some delicious dining too.

The ‘inside’ (the restaurant!) experience looks pretty special too. Next time?

Someone said I needed to have my picture in this blog occasionally, so my friend Tom did the honors. One of the ‘Black Boys of Cartagena’ mimed his gratitude for my handful of coins. That’s one person who doesn’t need to be reminded to hold still for the picture.

By the time we were thinking of dessert, the rest of the night-folk were just getting started.
Tough choices – how about one of each?

This post is an experiment with Windows Live Writer, writing offline and using pictures from an IPod Touch. I’ve gotten so backed up and behind with uploads and other technology problems in my old system that I need to try something new.

Also, we’ll be heading towards the San Blas soon, where there apparently is hardly any internet service, only sometimes email via the SSB radio, if I've added the recipient to my white list.
Maybe I’ll get some of the kinks worked out in the peace and quiet of a tropical anchorage!

Pretty Soon: 5th Annual Chub Festival

2011-01-30T10:51:00.009-06:00

Pretty Soon:
that's when the sign said that Fifth Annual Chub Fest was being held, three days forward from when we saw the sign.

Chub? The men on the street told us, is a kind of fish.

Further enquiries revealed that the festival would take place at the boat house near the music school (we don't see many of those!) and happen all afternoon. Probably happen at night too, but not for us daylight-circadian bicyclists.

So the following Wednesday, four of us pedaled our folding boat bikes back to the east side of the island. We were sitting in the TuttiFruti bar about midday having an ice-cold Costenita when we overheard a conversation about the start of the regatta down at Rolands Bar, estimated variously to be 'near' or 'twenty minutes' . The speaker was so enthusiastic that even the pedaller of the least bicycle among us agreed to check it out. He didn't know about the big hill at the end, but by the time he found out it was too late.

The boats are CayMAN (with the emphasis on MAN) Cat Boats. They don't fish, they don't 'yacht', they only race. This day there was a significant (at least, in pesos, it sounded like a big number) cash prize.
Photo Cayman catboat

We arrived just in time for the start, just off the beach. The course was a beat north behind the barrier reef, a circle around an offshore island and a run back to the boat house where the Chub Festival was held. As you can see it was a beautiful day, with fresh northeasterly trade winds.

Be forewarned: These are among my first videos from a little digital camera. I'm still working out a system for uploading. Any suggestions gratefully received. The longest video is under 2 minutes, and it seems you need to click on them and be taken to another site to watch. I left in some photos for those of you who, like me, don't have the bandwidth or the time to actually see the videos. There's plenty room for improvement here, but later.

The man in the pale blue shirt in the water is the official starter and race committee.
We trudged our way back up the hill. As we were doing so, one boat sank, and one withdrew from the race. Good thing they all had chase boats; the crew sometimes jumps ship mid-race to lighten the boat.

Back on the main road, at the first overlook we found ourselves in the middle of a rolling spectator fleet.
It was fun being part of the enthusiastic crowd.

We moved, with our dinky-ass little folding bikes swerving among the insouciant motorcyclists from overlook to overlook. My friend said she felt like she was running with the bulls at Pamplona. But my guess is that the bulls aren't nearly as mellow as the folks in Providencia.

A successful day for these men, even if they didn't finish first.
Seems like the video is behaving badly; our skilled technicians will be on the case as soon as they figure out what to do.

The food part of the festival was also a treat. Chub was served in several forms, ensalata, pernil, hamburguesa, au gratin, salpicon, sopa, pie, and washed down with my new favorite beverage, tamarindo. It was like a big family picnic where each aunt had brought her famous specialty, although some didn't have enough to sell.

People here are proud of their old traditions, of which cooking fish on the beach is one,

as pictured in this wall painting which decorates the trash depot. Other old-time (and current) traditions depicted include boat and horse racing, cockfighting, dancing, and traditional (washtub, mandolin, and for percussion, the jaw bone of a horse) music.

So, now you can see why we like Providencia.
The rest of the photo album, unedited, is here

http://galivant.smugmug.com/Other/Colombia/15304345_XtjnP/

Old Providence

2011-01-17T22:26:00.001-06:00

PHOTO MORGANS CRACK

Arriving in a new place is, for me, an almost sensual experience. If I had antennae, flared nostrils and whiskers, a flicking tongue, you'd see 'em all working. What I've got to work with is mostly visual, however (hence the camera?)

Coming in by boat, I like daybreak best. It's beautiful, often calm, maybe the aids to navigation are still lit - the best of all possible worlds, and it's all still fresh and new to all my receptors!

At Providencia's nicely sheltered harbour, Doug went ashore to do the captain business, while I re-feathered the nest ( it involves lots of wiping and putting away; talk about routine! Only sometimes do we break the pink-blue barriers).

To enter Colombia, an agent is required; otherwise we'd both be tramping from office to office making the best of a sometimes uneven cultural experience. Here all we had to do was pay Mr. Bernardo Bush. Doug came home from the ATM with a fistful of pesos, denominations in the thousands(roughly 2000 pesos per dollar, falling ever since we arrived), but hadn't a clue what it was worth. Despite the big numbers, it of course didn't last long.
PHOTO FISH MOSAICS

A few things we noticed right away.
First, lots of color, lots of art, lots of small things done with care, tidy. Mosaic signs, patterned sidewalks, nice street lights, decorative cutouts and gingerbread trim on buildings, and did I mention the colors?
PHOTOScooter sunset

Sturdy houses, many of them wood, in that nice island style you can still see in places like Carriacou.
PhoTO GINGERBREAD LAUNDRY BALCONY

Second, no guns. In Honduras every cell phone store and tortilla chip truck comes with an under-employed starch-uniformed private-security armed guard with a shotgun on his shoulder. Here it was just civilians in t-shirts and flimsy shoes.

Third, clean swept streets, trash cans, recycling bins! Later we saw the...hmmm, on Kent Island we used to call it the dump, but now it's the Sanitary Landfill/Waste Transfer station. All the Providencia trash is sorted, into giant bags made of feed sack cloth with handles. They look like my grocery bag writ large, but are small enough to be moved by forklift or small crane. Organized trash collection has a lot to recommend it.

And finally, largely English-speaking or English/Creole.

According to Wikipedia,

the population of the Archipelago of San Andres, Providencia and Santa Catalina uses three languages (Creole, English and Spanish). English was kept in the Baptist churches for liturgy, but the coming of satellite television and growth of foreign tourism has revived the use of the English in the islands. The presence of migrants from continental Colombia and the travel of young islanders to cities like Barranquilla, Cartagena de Indias and Bogotá for superior studies, has contributed to the presence of Spanish. However, the interest in preserving the Native Creole has become a very important element for locals and Colombians in general. Island creole is very similar to the English creole spoken in the Moskito coast of Nicaragua, and the Anglophone Caribbean.Like the Bay Islands of Honduras, the English presence was historically stronger than the Hispanic.

Those Englishmen may have been 'pirates' - Providencia uses Henry Morgan to descrbe physical features, Morgan's Crack is matched by Morgan's Head on the west side, but Morgan's gold is nowhere to be found.

Well offshore of the continent, geographically closer to Nicaragua or Honduras than to Colombia, even now Providencia still has strong ties to the Cayman Islands. The modern diaspora has also taken many Providencians to places like Tampa, FL and New Orleans LA. I was told this, but saw the evidence myself as the ship unloaded before Christmas.
PHOTO SHIP UNLOADING
Not just anyone can move here, not even just any Colombian; a permit needed for more than a six-month stay. This seems to be because the the 'indigenous culture", the Raizal, is protected, with other language groups, by the Colombian Constitution of 1991. That's what Mr. Bush was talking about when he emphasized the strictness of the immigration laws and our need for an expensive tourist card. I thought he meant the likes of us boat people, but apparently we're known to be short term and there's other game.

Providencia has less than 20km of road circling the coast, and a population of maybe 4 or 5 thousand people. The town is about 3 square blocks in area, and then there's another small island attached by a bridge/causeway, for pedestrians only. Nearly every one seems to own a motor scooter. It would be fun to record all the various things we saw being done on or carried by scooter, but I'm having enough fun already.
PHOTO DOUG PUSHING BIKE UP MAIN ST AFTER SHOWER

Unlike its more thoroughly developed sister island of San Andreas, Providencia is 'unspoilt' by tourism. Or, rather, the tourism is at a very modest level, low and mellow. One of my friends called it a 'rustic rock'. I love rustic! There are no highrise hotels; in fact there is barely anything that you'd associate with a 'tourist mecca' except the handful of yachts at anchor and some tourists at Catalina Island, FreshWater Bay and Southwest Bay, in a few small hotels.

PHOTO VIEW NE SIDE

The main road, which encircles an old (small) volcanic plug of the type you'd see in the Marquesas, just begged to be explored on our little folding bikes. I'm happy to report that Providencia can be successfully circumnavigated in an afternoon.

This allows for a few tourist/beer stops.
PHOTO BEER STOP

These are the local beers. For 'imported beers' where we're used to seeing Heineken, St Pauli Girl, etc, here it's Old Milwaukee, in cans.

There are a couple push-the-bike-up-the-hill hills as well. Despite them, we made it back home before dark.
PEAK STEEPLE WOMEN

At least, after another day of binge exercise, we didn't end up here, at the Sunshine Funeral Home.

Previous versions of this blog post may have suffered from the operator falling asleep while waiting for things to upload. Sorry!

Retrospective

2011-01-01T18:31:00.004-06:00

A few follow-up comments from past blogs:

The last holdout colony of ants, the ones who lived under the hatch turtle, I believe have been vanquished. I was starting to think we had developed a super-breed, Maryland plus Guatemala plus Honduras, but a couple drops of the Terro that I brought back from the US did the trick. In fact I believe that at this moment, the boat is free of any sort of animal, other than the two of us.
UPDATE: actually, no. Yesterday I saw a cute little gecko-like animal, not more than 2" long, scuttle under the water tank/.Long may s/he live.

The lionfish, an invasive species from the Pacific that moved into this ocean after Hurricane Andrew and onto my radar as we were diving and snorkeling in Roatan last year, are around all these islands in substantial force. At West End Roatan, riends report that they sight dozens each time they dive. But still, only park management is allowed to shoot them. From Lighthouse Reef the same report except there's no one out there to keep you from vigilante-ism; additionally the comment that there are numerous fish in the 3-4 pound size. And there's a public relations campaign encouraging eradication (method unspecified) in Providencia, a Colombian island.

Lionfish are said to be tasty, but the risk of being pricked and poisoned by a very unpleasant venom contained in the dorsal spines is off-putting. Perhaps we could get a marketing genius to align lionfish with fugu, the poisonous pufferfish that the Japanese play Russian roulette with.

Last December I was jauntily invoking Johnny Depp and the pirates of the Caribbean, as we spent the night, by ourselves, in an isolated anchorage, Diamante Lagoon, on mainland Honduras. So this last item is harder to write about, as it involves murder. The victim was a man we knew from the Rio Dulce, and admired, a very smart and mellow person. In fact his picture is in the blog as a participant in the 4th of July blind dinghy races. Milan Egrmajer was killed there, by pirates, about the time we were rounding Cabo Gracias a Dios.

Well, I'm not feeling so jaunty any more. In fact part of me is really angry, at the entire country of Honduras for being such a dysfunctional, poorly governed place with so many guns and one of the highest murder rates in the world. I'm angry at the entire system, the mindset, not just at the gunman and his associates (which maybe just goes to show how irrational an emotion anger can be). The rest of me is having to persuade myself that the law of averages is still on my side.

Often in Honduras I had the feeling that we tourist gringos in our 'enclaves' were 'protected' by private interests. The management of the shipyard pays for protection; drug cartels keep the lid on bad elements who might otherwise bring unwanted attention to the area; local merchants or whoever benefits from our presence hovers over us. You could say it was 'market economy justice'; we were protected by economics more than by rules of polite conduct. We certainly need looking after in places like Honduras; we bumble around, looking rich, ignorant of all local politics and issues, putting ourselves in the middle of situations we know nothing of, oblivious to their ramifications, and powerless to change the circumstances.

So Milan was shot point-blank by one of four men in a lancha which had approached his boat, Adena, asking for help. His poor daughter, down from Canada for a trip to Panama, managed to frighten them off with a flare gun. She then spent what must have been terrified hours trying to get help. What news reports I've had access to are amazingly discordant in essential details and the comments attached are appalling in their lack of sympathy and their misunderstanding of the circumstances.

It's just a terrible situation all around.
http://www.cbc.ca/canada/story/2010/12/10/myda-egrmajer.html

Cabo Gracias a Dios

2010-12-27T13:27:00.002-06:00

The trip 'around the corner' and down towards Colombia and Panama is not one that we were looking forward to, being 160 nautical miles to windward and then a run through a reefy area off the Mosquito Coast. But eventually the day came where the easterly tradewinds were trumped by the northwest and north winds of an approaching cold front, and it was time to go

We left Guanaja in company with another boat. Well,'travelling with' in the sense that Pluto travels with Mercury - this catamaran arrived half a day before we did. Here's a little video they took of us on our first day out.
Or not, lots of trouble uploading this six-second video clip.

This video is just a little experiment; can anyone see it? You need Flash.

Then, a white smudge that I kept peering at thinking it was a small boat heading our way turned into a waterspout. Luckily, it didn't reach to the clouds until it was past us, and stayed a respectful distance away.

This part of Nicaragua is the Mosquito Coast, and from what people say about it, it sounds like a last frontier, out beyond the reach of the law. It's not a recommended destination due in part to drug-related activity. Plus the charts are outdated - islands have been reconfigured in recent hurricanes. I've read that it took Christopher Columbus 40 or 50 days (accounts vary) to work his way around this cape, hence the name Gracias a Dios. Good weather windows just aren't that big, he didn't have any charts, and not much windward sailing ability either. But I've also read that he had a fortuitous wind shift. I think Christopher Columbus probably had lots of opportunity to say Gracias a Dios.

Our last night out, approaching Providencia, was disconcertingly dark, like the inside of a coal mine. Shower clouds around the horizon blotted out the starshine; moonrise was about half an hour before sunrise. We were dawdling for daylight, so sailed off the wind under bare poles, drifting at about 1 kt down the west side of Providencia. Sunrise at the sea buoy, on through the channel, and ready for another adventure, after a little nap.

WHAT'S AFOOT IN GUANAJA

2010-12-14T15:47:00.002-06:00

If you look at the chart of Guanaja, Honduras, the easternmost of the Bay Islands, you’ll see a series of ‘peaks’ in the one to three hundred-meter range. The highest point, Michael Rock Peak, logs in at 415 meters.

CHART OF GUANAJA

You’ll also see the notation “Densely Wooded”. This is less true now, post-hurricane Mitch (1998), which mowed down huge swathes of pine forest on both sides of the island. Recovery is underway but for now the only dense woods might be in certain valley bottoms.

We took a hike up to Michael Peak with a resident gringo who probably knows more about the old trails than almost anyone else here. He hikes them regularly, carrying a machete as if it were a parade rifle.

Guanaja, we were told, doesn’t have the water problems that more developed islands like Roatan have. ‘Don’t believe everything anyone tells you’ said our friend. ‘Water can be a problem here too.’ He took us to a dam which supplies the main settlement on Bonacatown the island.

PICTURE OF DRINKING WATER RESERVOIR

Then he told us: was it 2005? Lots of weather systems coming through, and three days, each with more than 25” per day = an inch per hour.‘We had so much rain there wasn’t any water to drink’. How did that happen, I wondered. Turns out that the quartz sand in the soil washed down into the reservoir and filled it, so much so that it had to be dug out during the dry season. Credulously, I can see how that might happen. There’s a big delta-fan of white sand in front of Hans’ bar from the same summer.

It seems like several valleys have dams and streams, even waterfalls. We met another property owner whose land’s finest feature was a constantly running stream with a dammed pool.
It would be a real treat to lounge here.

Otherwise, much of Guanaja's land is little used. There once was agriculture, in the form of coconut products, but between disease and a blow from hurricane Fifi in the 1970s, that has long gone. Cattle, especially if loose, will ruin the water cachements. There are cows around, but not on that scale here. Even growing a personal garden is a struggle with the elements, the soil, and a multitude of critters.

When I said that some day soon the trails would be too overgrown to find our friend said, no, your feet will find them. The soil is compressed so, that although vegetation may sometimes cover the visual track, the earth still holds the trodden line intact. And it seemed true. Trudging along, there was always room for our feet, no matter how much the grass, some of it ‘cutting grass,’ snagged at our shins.

On we went. A fire also went through here several years after the hurricane. In areas, the trees, some replanted and some volunteers, are finally getting tall enough to offer shade. And of course there are spectacular views under any conditions.

Here’s a look to the south and west. The larger island is Bonacatown, where the bulk of the population lives despite the, to me, salubrious environs of the peaks.

VIEW TOWARD BONACATOWN

And here’s a view toward the second settlement of Savannah Bight.

VIEW TOWARDS SAVANNAH BIGHT

And a view of the anchorage of El Bight

EL BIGHT ANCHORAGE

Can you pick out Galivant? You can also maybe make out the fan of white sand, and the canal with 6 feet of water that some local boats use as hurricane shelter.

Eventually, of course, we got to the top, just in time for a little shower from a little dark cloud that hangs out up here. I've been told that Guanaja means 'dark cloud'. Should I believe that too?

G ON PEAK LOOKING S&W

On the way home, I had to retrace my steps to find something that I dropped, while the guys napped in shaded grass.

Doug and I got more exercise in a day than we’d had in the previous month. “There’s a lot more ‘middle’ to this island than we can see from the boat”, Doug said. Nonetheless, next time I’m back in Guanaja I’m definitely going to let my feet find another trail.

Out of LaCeiba for good!

2010-11-22T21:52:00.000-06:00

Funny how what once was tolerable seems less so the closer it gets to the end. That’s how we were feeling as we slipped away from La Ceiba Shipyard early Wednesday morning with a huge sigh of relief. The woman who made Doug's lunch every day was starting to mark his styrofoam trays 'delgado' 'skinny', so it was clearly past time for us to resume our normal life.

We motored toward French Harbor, Roatan, and then, actually got to sail at a tolerable rate of progress. And then, we caught a fish. It seems like years since we’ve hauled one in. PHOTO OF FISH IN BUCKETAs you might recognize, this is a red-meat fish, not to everyone's taste. We have a special marinade that we call 'fishkiller sauce', made with garlic, ginger, soy, oil. Makes anything taste good! Also, if you saw how fast a tot of alcohol to the gills stops a fish, you'd think twice about your own next shot! We used some of Thelma's Canadian Club which has been languishing in various bilges for quite some time.

And then, anchored in the familiar harbor, I got to go for a swim. We visited some friends, I finished a good book (Margaret Atwood, Payback).That evening it rained and we caught nice drinking and shower and washing water. Could life get any better?

Well, no. Doug was eager to move east towards Guanaja despite the looming rainclouds of a widespread frontal trough. It rained and rained some more, the west wind never materialized (thankfully, neither did the lightening). As befits a shake-down (trickle-down?) cruise, we found leaks running behind the chart table, past acres of wiring, under the refrigeration compressor and out onto the cabin sole.

But the weather cleared decently on our final approach to the anchorage at El Bight. Flow analysis easily revealed the source of the leak – the chainplates – and now they’re all goobered up again. I caught more rain, started another book (Reefer Madness, Eric Schlosser, also very interesting) and life is fine again.

Being tied alongside a dock is nice for a change, but it’s great to be on the hook, where the humidity generally blows on through the boat rather than congealing on every interior surface. Even my wooden cooking spoons were growing fur! The solar panels and wind generator are back at work, trying to keep up with our ever-increasing power needs.

We’ve even got an invite for Thanksgiving dinner, which will be on Friday, since the supplies get off the boat late on Thursdays. Of course, we can’t commit until Thursday night – gotta check the weather, you know – but I hope we get to go. It’s the first invite I’ve ever had where jello shooters are on the Thanksgiving menu. Remembering that fish, I'll probably stick to beer.

On the gadget front: I've got a fondness for cunning little things that work with a minimum of fuss and a maximum of 'elegance'. Here we have something called Super-Siphon. It's just a shaped piece of brass, with a pretty blue marble inside, attached to a plastic hose. If you want to start a siphon going you just stick it into the 'out bucket' and jiggle it until the flow starts. Neat, eh? And it really works.
*one definition of cunning Executed with or exhibiting ingenuity.

And We're BAACK!

2010-11-08T20:46:00.000-06:00

Doug returned to Honduras a couple weeks ago, rarin' to go on the bottom job, and a few other things he had in mind. I stayed in Maryland, emptying, cleaning, painting and renting the house, selling the car, doing things my way! Neither of us got as much done as we had hoped, but that's to be expected. After the usual self-inflicted last minute rush, it was a relief to spend a few hours in anonymous airports, spacing out.

My first night on the boat, which was still out of the water, I woke up in that disconcerting, middle of the night place, not knowing where I was. It took a long time for pieces of information to drift in: this is not a feather bed, I was on an airplane recently, where was it going? oh, and a bus too...that's Doug over there...it's the boat and my toes are pointing east-ish. Finally I got myself drilled down to LaCeiba Shipyard, where I find myself today.

But not for long, I hope. We need to get the sails back on, the cover stowed, if it ever dries out, the interior wiped down with vinegar. We need groceries, a fresh cruising permit, maybe some refrigeration gas (or, no refrigeration!) After a summer of sort of minimalist living, I feel like we need to get rid of some stuff here too (books!). And then we need to get moving.

The sooner the better - this political season was shocking!

U-Turn to US

2010-06-21T20:49:00.116-06:00

We were in Guanaja enjoying ourselves and watching the weather for the opportunity to make a comfortable trip around Cabo Gracias a Dios. That's why we were still there when we heard of a few reasons why we might want to return to Maryland. That's how we ended up back at the shipyard in La Ceiba that we had so gleefully escaped only shortly before. This time we paid for bottom paint removal, worth every penny. So while we're away, the boat will be drying out; we'll put on a new barrier coat and bottom paint when we get back in the fall.
PHOTO PAINT DUST BILLOWING CALOOSA

We took the 'most luxurious' Hedman-Alas bus from La Ceiba to San Pedro Sula's airport. Apparently luxury means tall seat backs with fresh covers freshly applied, and silence, which is indeed a luxury, since lots of buses show kung-fu movies in 'surround sound'. But where was the steward with the canapes and champagne?

We ourselves felt more like checked baggage, or hazardous materials. Couldn't buy a ticket without a passport, couldn't change seats, couldn't touch our own luggage once it was checked (note to self: next time, dress for arctic cooling); had our photos taken before boarding. Turns out H-A worry about hijacking/kidnapping; they'd want to know which passenger it was/had been in seat 23C. This isn't something that happens on the chicken buses. Or maybe this was the 'chicken' bus.

Then, we spent hours propped upright in the airport waiting for our red-eye flight. The reward was a hypnotizing view of bright moon over cloud banks as almost the entire plane-load of passengers slept, not unlike a nice night passage. And, ya know, it's only 888 miles/2 hours to a whole 'nother world.

In Ft. Lauderdale at daybreak we could barely stop remarking on how clean, that is, free of trash, and orderly, the landscape was, and how pink, and plump, were many of the locals. We knew this, but had forgotten. Tri-Rail expeditiously zipped us north for a brief visit with the only family I have whose memories are longer than my own.

Within hours we were in a car driving ourselves at 60 mph, as if we'd never left. We tried to sneak down to Goodwill for clothes that weren't so 'nautically' bleached and frayed as the ones we arrived in, but they were closed for Memorial Day. No problemo - everyone in the US has clothes they want to get rid of. Just as well too, I wouldn't know how to dress myself if I had to chose from the entire clothing universe.
We ate in restaurants that had entrees other than something-and-rice-and-beans on the menu. We shopped in supermarkets stunning in their range of stock.
SUPERMARKET SIGN

And with a big-screen TV, we got the full effect of the oil spill and of all the spiteful arguments surrounding it. How quickly we adapt.

Clearly we would need a car of our own, and a cell phone. It took a week in Florence, Alabama during a visit with Doug's family and friends to organize both of these things. We used to laugh about the questions you have to remember to ask before making a deal in Central America; well, it's the same in this world too.
USED CAR SALESMAN

After a few false starts we had to buy the phone at a Walmart. Next, I need to learn to text without looking at the numeric keys. It will be like learning Morse code; an exercise in temporary technology, but possibly good for me.

After several further adventures (future posts) we finally got to our sweet little house on the creek in Maryland. I can tell you that in all our travels, there are few places that can compare.
VIEW DOWN WAREHOUSE CREEK ON THE LAST DAY OF SPRING

Considering that the sprawl of greater BosNyWash has tsunami-ed Kent Island, I'm grateful that so little has changed within my frontal periphery (although lots outside it).
RT 50 TRAFFIC

The weather is perfect. The crabs are running, honey flow is still on, peaches are in season, local 'lopes, sweet corn, and hallelujah, real, fragrant, tomatoes, are starting to appear. We're getting settled in for a social spell in The Land of Pleasant Living. But first, a visit with my remaining bees.
HARVESTING WILD COMB

'My' bees have been on their own for two winters. Nobody told them they had to built rectilinearly, so they didn't.

Rodeo

2010-06-10T19:49:00.005-06:00

PHOTO LINE OF COWBOYS
I've never been to a rodeo ([from Spanish, from rodear to go around, from rueda a wheel, from Latin rota] says freedictionary.com), and maybe that's still true despite the hours I spend at the fairgrounds out next to the airport in La Ceiba, Honduras a few Sundays ago. What I did see was bull-riding, and horse riding, in separate rings. I don't know what standards exactly the men in white were trying to express as they glided around above their horses but the atmosphere, broad-brimmed hats, kerchiefs etc all had a strong whiff of Seville.
PHOTO STIRRUP AND SPUR

The bull-riders just wanted to stay on for seven seconds, and their circles were much smaller and more frantic.

Here's a hapless bullrider whose boot got hung up somewhere and was dragged around the ring before being rescued.

There was one man in particular charged with diverting the bull after the rider was dumped. I was a little offended by his clownish, disrespectful-of-the-bull manner, except when the bull really got his attention.
BULL CHASING CLOWN

This mule and cowboy team was the real worker of the day, calm, steady, effective, good at lasso-ing, also the only cowboy I ever saw wearing glasses.
The fancy-prancy horses occasionally appeared, but their saddles didn't have horns and their riders were only good at sitting still and exuding 'cool'.

Otherwise the fairground events closing the Carnival of San Isidro were pretty typical of a Maryland county fair, bovine division, with food tents, souvenirs, cows and horses on display.
COWBOY WATCHING HORSE

Every time this vendor came around I wondered what his t-shirt was about. Dole?Standard Fruit? It says 'Warren Buffet Our New Top Banana'

UPDATE: From one of my smart friends "Is a play on the fact that Fruit of the Loom went bankrupt back in 1999 and in 2002 Berkshire Hathaway bought the company. You may or may not remember that the human fruits were part of one of the more classic TV ads of all time [Wiki side note: the grapes were once played by Academy Award-winning actor F Murray Abraham!]" Thank you Michael!

Here's my souvenir of the rodeo; a new hat. It's got some really stiff clear coat treatment over woven 'palm', not a very boat-friendly hat, but it will be very light and comfortable while it degrades in Ann's hat camp.

More rodeo photos here:
http://galivant.smugmug.com/Honduras/Rodeo/12294128_4X66v/
Sure is nice to have a fast-loading internet connection - Thanks Jim & Jackie!

Carnival of San Isidro

2010-06-09T11:21:00.003-06:00

Back in La Ceiba, we arrived during one of the biggest events of the year, the week-long carnival of San Isidro, reputedly one million in attendance from throughout the country. It ended with a parade on Saturday and a rodeo on Sunday. I'm not sure what happens at night, but during the daytime parade people were very well behaved, even demure, compared to, say, St. Thomas.

Horses featured more than I had expected. One of our routes in Roatan took us near a stable where we occasionally saw these artificially pacing horses. It was beautiful to watch, if you closed your mind to how the horse might normally have behaved, and the fact that chains and hobbles were part of the training regimen. The horses' chins are pressed to their chests, and they prance a peculiar high-kneed gait, flinging their hooves out and around instead of straight up and down, sometimes frothing at the mouth and under the reins.
For the rider, however, the point must be to look insouciant and effortless. A martini in a stemmed glass of course would not spill, although I don't think these riders drink martinis.
Okay, so it's an artificial definition of beauty, like women in high heels, of which there are also a multitude.
PHOTO GOLD HIGH HEELS

Men, to appear attractive, often only have to be make money and spend it freely, which seems relatively easy compared to walking funny most of your life!

The carnival was street food

and toy vendors
PINWHEEL CABBAGE

CUTE KIDS

MASKS

BEADS

DANCERS

SPECTATORS

QUEENS AND KINGS

At the head of all these floats are a few people with brooms and 'boat hooks' to lift the numerous power cables over the peacock feathers and other obstacles.
AEROBATICS

GAMES OF CHANCE

REFRESHMENT

CROWDS AT THE END

And, the picture I missed, the person who picked the pocket of a casual acquaintance who should have known better than to carry everything in his wallet, in his back pocket. All part of the adventure, folks!
The whole photo file is located here
http://galivant.smugmug.com/Honduras/Isidri-Carnival-La-Ceiba/12280432_Uq4gH/

Guanaja

2010-05-27T22:37:00.002-06:00

PHOTO VIEW ACROSS GRAHAMS CAY
‘If you like it here, don’t say anything’ one man told me, and so I'm telling only you select few, sotto voce. It's sage advice here on Guanaja, where there seems a pleasant balance between the races, as one local told us. He defines races as: ‘people like us’(although others would distinguish his Bay Islandish-ness from our pure gringo-ness), Spaniards, Indians (two kinds: kinky- haired, and smooth-haired beautiful women), Garifuna (who are mixed African via St. Vincent), and... ” I forget the last – maybe it’s any mix of the above, which is where the tendencies certainly lie.

What’s there to do on Guanaja? The late lamented captain of the Windjammer Fantome used to introduce his talks about the island by following the question with a long silence, until people got the joke.
PHOTO OF TOE AND KNOT HOLE
The Ship and the Storm by Jim Carrier is a most interesting book about the loss of the Fantome during hurricane Mitch. After a week-long series of bad assumptions and misinformation, the ship was lost south of Guanaja, in an area we'd sail over on our way east.

In Guanaja there is a good anchorage with great holding – El Bight, and other good anchorages too. PHOTO OF PHOTO OF BONACCATOWN
There’s a pleasant and compact little town, not on the big island but on a gradually expanding little one of sidewalks and small canals, free of sand fleas, just offshore. That’s Bonnaca-town;hold your mouth just so and Bonnaca=Guanaja are the same word. People have a fondness for building out over the water throughout the Bay Islands.

There are a few private or resort cays and reefs facing east-ish toward the tradewinds. Jimmy and Rosalyn Carter were here bonefishing last month - I saw the video. Even after all these years, they can't seem to travel without security and constant scrutiny. Diving is another attraction, of course.
PHOTO THE NEIGHBORHOOD DOLPHIN
This fellow has apparently been cruising this anchorage for years. Now I ashamedly make sure s/he's not around before I dump my grapefruit peels, laundry water, chicken bones, etc. Of course I try to communicate telepathically, but fail. "What does s/he want?" I asked someone. Attention, was the answer, and the story, how the dolphin found a boat with a dog that would bark at him, until the dog got tired of that and hid in the cockpit when the dolphin came around.

Round the backside of Guanaja, which is easily accessible by lancha and dinghy via a cut through the mangroves, past the airport dock, is a practically empty, beach-and reef- fringed territory. There’s even a ‘hike to the waterfall’ – one of my favorite destinations anywhere I go.

Guanaja has a small population, maybe 8-10,000. There are two other settlements, Savannah Bight on the southeast side and Mangrove Bight to the north, connected by an post-Mitch autobahn of a road for the tiny number of vehicles on the island.
PHOTO COOL BREEZE SAVANNAH BIGHT Mangrove Bight was practically wiped out in the hurricane, and not too many people there rebuilt on stilts over the water. It's the only place I've ever been where people have sidled alongside to offer the sale of building lots.

Guanaja once had more pine trees than it has now. The center of hurricane Mitch used Guanaja as its pivot and a dozen year later the scars are still visible. It has marble outcrops in the mountains, and perhaps because of the same underlying geological irregularities it has a sufficiency of fresh water that the other Bay islands lack. There seem to be a lot of fairly quirky locals of all ‘races’, and more than a few of the expats came here via deep-sea diving on oil rigs, like Mr. Canute.
I met a taxi driver in La Ceiba from Guanaja who sounded like you couldn’t pay him to live ‘back there’, but I like it just fine. Quiet and low-key Guanaja is just my style.
We’re getting to know the cast of characters in Bonaccatown. It’s a treat to sit on the bench across from the credit union drinking from a straw dipped in a plastic bag of ‘mora’ (I think it’s the juice from some mulberry-type tree) and watch the passing scene.
The fruit and veg boat comes about Thursday, there’s a bakery and several supermercados and ferreterias.
It may be the only place in Honduras where dealing with officialdom is ‘fast, free and easy.’This is about where we usually tie the dinghy.

On the shore of El Bight, the anchorage a half a mile or so away, is what I think of as the German quarter. You wouldn’t expect to find excellent schnitzels and spaetzls here, but there they are at the Manati. Last week they killed a pig and used all its parts, although I did not rush to the liverwurst. Maybe next time. I was having a gut reaction, remembering from fourth grade how hard it was to trade a liverwurst sandwich for something ‘decent’, like Susie's peanut butter and marshmallow.

The social event of the week, at least for gringos, is the Saturday afternoon meal at the Manati, where you can meet several curious people. Oftentimes ‘yachties’ are mere rank outsiders at these events. But here, despite our transience, people remember our names from week to week. And the book exchange is better than most.

Next door is the other Hans’ bar, tucked along the beach next to some storage containers.
He’s another great character, full of ideas; in the orderly German fashion, a lot of them have already been executed during his decades here. We talk beekeeping, cattle-raising, motorcycle racing. Right now he’s building a dehydrator – email me if you’d like to buy some delicious organic dried mangoes, available fresh, in bulk.
Finally, here's the jail. One day I saw a young man looking out through the grill in the door as I was trying to peep in. Inside it's like a cinderblock phone booth, best avoided!

PHOTO THE JAIL DOOR

Putting Food By

2010-05-16T23:00:00.010-06:00

I'm pretty sure chicken exceeds any other animal protein consumed in Central America, by a wide margin. This 'chicken ranch' was tucked just off the highway in Roatan, between the propane filler and a paint store.
While we were in the shipyard, plugged in, we ran the freezer and boy wasn’t that ice nice! To fill the rest of the space I bought some whole chickens, Pollo Rey, 2 sin menudos and 1 con menudos,
. Sometimes there is more to 'menudos' than anticipated, as from this Guatemalan chicken I processed last summer.

My plan was to can/jar the meat in the pressure canner I’ve been hauling around, so we'd have something to eat when we get to the San Blas. But it was too darn hot in the shipyard to even contemplate a few hours of steam.

Now that we’re on our own power, we can’t run the freezer without also running the engine, which we won’t do unless for propulsion (one of the secret rules). But we do have a good breeze ventilating the boat. So I’m canning chickens.

First, cook each one individually in the Galloping Gourmet method – submerge the whole bird in water, bring to a boil and let cool naturally. I'm under-motivated to dismember and debone them raw.
Pick off the meat, discard the skin and fat, (store overnight because I got a late start), make stock with onions, celery leaves and wilted carrots, strain it, reheat the picked out meat, wash out the jars....well you can see it’s a consuming project, and the boat smells, sort of incongruously,like the day after Thanksgiving. Seven pints of meat and a good tom yam Thai-style soup was the yield; for dessert some delicious mangoes from a local tree.

Some of the best advice I ever got about boat cooking was: Keep the floor clean, because you never know when you’ll be eating off of it. Next time, I’ll remember to do a little better under the stove as well. There’s many a slip between jar and dip!

2010-05-14T22:07:00.000-06:00

The Ships of La Ceiba Shipyard are fishing boats. Probably 95% are hand-me-downs from the Louisiana Gulf shrimping fleet. There may be thousands of these vessels throughout the Bay Islands and coastal Honduras, some fit and spry, and some on life support.

SEA BREEZE SHARK
We had the fortune, not sure if good or bad, to be in the shipyard during the three months that the fishing (lobstering/conching/snow crabbing) season is closed and the 'fix the boat' season was open.
These guys were paddling out to work on one of the most derelict of the vessels; on the next trip a couple went back with a big portable generator they'd taken home for the weekend, against theft, I guess.

These guys ripped off the old pilot house and fabricated this new one in about two weeks - a beautiful job. Then they started on the boat next door.

Across the creek they’re manufacturing the little Cayuga/dories that conch and lobster divers use.
The ever-popular machete is used for trimming off the rough edges.

The shipyard has been hot, hot hot, but the main reason for the nighttime welding is simply because there is so much to do.

My theory about the rats who have visited us is that they were aboard the fishing boats until they got disrupted by the rebuilding activities.

Before welding comes sandblasting. The sand is actually “Black Magnum” anthracite coal pellets, shipped in from Illinois in cement-type bags. We are still finding bits of it in our scuppers.

The birds still sing in the morning - we're right next to a perch in a one-tooth remnant patch of mangrove. Later all the music is 'techno': routers, sanders, the roar of the air compressor, atonal chipping hammer percussion.

Osman, although he might not have known it, was our main contact with marina management, and

We also met KARLA who rode in on her scooter every day to deliver styrofoam trays of lunch, $2 each, order ahead. Sometimes I'd call her and through the music and babies crying in the background she'd know it was me: "Oh Dona Ana, dos almuerzos, un cerdo y un pollo, si?" "Si, Karla, gracias"
We learned to stay away from the 'res' beef though.

Before we left we said goodbye to the Westerbeke, going home in Luis's truck. That's Toby, a fun boat kid in front. Good think Luis came back for a rope to hold the box in the truck bed; when he returned it he said he'd almost lost it on a hill.

Another Red Letter Day, sort of

2010-04-28T22:12:00.001-06:00

It's been almost a month since the new engine arrived in the engine compartment. I'm sure if we had ever done this before, we could have moved more expeditiously. Carefully modelled (by Doug) and less carefully fabricated (by the machinist) motor mounts occupied more than a week of our time. The air has often been blue with aggravation.
PHOTO MOTOR MOUNTS
Anyhow, the engine started on the first cranking and seems to run just fine. There's an odd noise from the transmission in reverse, more than a hum, less than a whine, but no rattle or clanking. None of the handful of 'dock doctors' could figure it out. We're coming to think 'bearing'. I'm sure we'll get used to the sound, especially if we keep moving forward.

We've almost reclaimed our living space from the cabinetry, tools, bottles of fluids and boxes of hoses. Good thing, because our visas don't have much longer to run and hurricane season's creeping this way. But we're still putting things back together, neatening up, restocking the boat, looking for Universal Red engine paint to repair some chain hoist dings, etc.

it's also been a couple weeks since we dispatched the rat down the river in its adhesive trap. That was Rat Number One. Rat Two was a wilier animal; he/she escaped the glue trap, did a rat-tail veronica with our expensive Victor Rat trap, and began to turn his nose up at peanut butter, in any location. What other bait is there?

No more anthropomorphism from me! This rat opened our foil packs of salsa and refried beans, gnawed at the floor under the fridge, shunned a full strip of fatty bacon, teased us by moving baits he didn't intend to eat. This rat caused us to stand rat watches, in case the glue trap took a hit, caused us to store our vulnerable foods in the oven and freezer and caused us to move our sails and extra lines out on deck. In steamy April Honduras, we sleep with hatches and ports closed or solidly screened, hardware cloth in the dorades, boards in the companionway.

We bought rat poison, warfarin, (can't use that word without thinking of my father, who I think was rather pleased to have his own blood thinned by so generic a product). But the rat turned its nose up at the pink pellets and at the green pellets.

So one day the taxista Javier. told me I needed the liquid poison. That's the 'dead within 2 feet' stuff I'd been looking for. But I didn't know to look in the pharmacy. First Javier bought me a syringe, (15 cents). Then, in another place, he got a little bottle of 'Rayo' $1.25 and indicated that at the first bite something would swell up in the rat's mouth and it would die. I should wear gloves, he said, and wash my hands. But I could wash out the syringe and use it for something else later on!

Everything I know about poisons I've learned from Agatha Christie. It takes only the tiniest bit to kill the vicar, the interloper, or the captain. Rayo's bottle has a skull-and-crossbones, and the indication to induce vomiting and get a stomach pump-out if it's ingested, but seemingly anyone could buy the stuff without any question. Vicars, interlopers and captains, beware!

And rats too. I've got a lifetime (!) supply of Rayo. Today the rat finally started to stink. It must have taken a tiny nibble of an injected Bimbo baguette as it moved it around the cockpit locker. The rat died aft of the cockpit lockers halfway to the propane locker, under a bag of dive gear. Doug grabbed its tail with the 'feely grabber' tool and swung it to the river. Tonight I'm going to sleep well for the first night in weeks.

Rat Patrol

2010-04-05T20:54:00.008-06:00

What do you feed your rat? We give ours peanut butter on Bimbo bread, on a china plate, as much as he wants. Reminds me a little of courtship: get the prospective spouse (see how carefully gender neutral I am?) used to the good life, and then, one night, spring the trap. Well, that's what's going to happen here in a couple hours.

A rat moved aboard in the midst of a rainstorm two nights ago. I saw it out off the corner of my eye, between me and the meat cleaver, and then it ran back towards the engine compartment. We were warned to button up tight at night, but of course, believing ourselves invulnerable, we didn't.

Rats on a boat are a sorry joke - they're said to eat wires as well as groceries, and if poisoned, may die and fester in unknown and inaccessible places. It only took the memory of my grandmother's Mercedes Benz, which lived near a cornfield in winter and was so badly colonized throughout by mice that it probably was junked despite its little-old-lady-low miles, to launch me into immediate action.

The weapon of choice was a poisonous instant killer,('they'll immediately die within 2 feet of the bait') but we couldn't find it anywhere in town. So we came home with a giant glue trap, 'peanut-butter scented', instead.

If I were marketing a rat trap like this, I would show a fiendish beast ripping open my chocolate bar, peeing on my potatoes, vandalizing my computer cable. Instead, the package shows a perky, winsome little fellow that I am expected to torture before killing. The Rats Rights League at work?

Right now, this not-quite-bushy-tailed raton is probably lying dreamily in his hammock, looking forward to his day, just like I do!

Meanwhile, the humanoids are strategizing their campaign, arguing about the placement of the Final Sandwich, contemplating the worst case scenario, selecting a coup de grace modestly less cruel and unusual than the tangled-foot torment envisioned by the trap manufacturer. Overhearing our debate, I think it's about time for us to get away from the dock.

UPDATE: The deed is done. The rat was the one who left the dock, not the humanoids. Raton was last seen in his well-caulked plastic barge, floating downstream; vessel not under command. We didn't need the 4x4 or the hammer, can re-use the second trap if necessary.

Red letter day -Beta!

2010-04-01T18:17:00.003-06:00

After measuring the come-along (in Honduran Spanish, a 'senorita')against the engine compartment, I pedaled back to the ferreteria to exchange it for a fine Chinese 1-ton chain hoist.I also bought myself a crowbar. Then we scavenged the shipyard perimeter for strong-back and blocking materials. Doug cut some plywood to line the hull. Our strongback, a 4x4, needed some bracing, and so did the battery shelf which held up its starboard side. With this motley crew, we awkwardly inveigled the Westerbeke toward the companionway, then through the companionway. The biggest problem is that the companionway is not on the centerline of the boat where the shaft and engine are. The pros don't do it the way we did it! I don't know how you spent the first weekend of spring, but we surfaced on Sunday night looking like coal miners.

On Monday, the yard said 'no problema' to everything we asked, but in the end we towed our own selves around to the lift slip. Thanks to that delightful chain hoist, we didn't need the 'four strong men' who were supposed to physically lift the 500+ pounds out of the tiny space. Removing the hard dodger simplified matters significantly. The travel lift operator, the only English speaker in the crew, sent down his 'brazo' and we cranked the Westerbeke up and out with the chain hoist as the 'Hyster'(fork lift), moved the Beta into lift-off position.

Kind of like a baby arriving (as if I'd know!) via stork, the Beta flew in and slowly squeezed down the companionway. Our 'four strong men' in the cockpit echoed our 'arriba's and 'abajo's and the more urgent 'stop!'s to the lift operator. The Beta will be named Stan- if the name sticks - for Beta's US rep who has been a prince to deal with. Its first official act was to gush its very clean motor oil onto me. It sat on the first step while Doug unbolted a few more bits. We climbed in and out of the boat gracelessly through the forward hatch as we adapted to the new crewmember. The re-engining ceremony was accompanied by degreaser, a toilet brush and a toothbrush for buffing around the shaft log and stringers. White epoxy paint in the engine compartment would have been lovely, but let's be realistic!

Meanwhile, outside it's Semana Santa - Holy Week. The shipyard workers fled Wednesday at noon; Javier the taxista told me only the poor people like him had to work. Today we watched a lancha loading a dozen or more people, bags of groceries, bottles of water, a yapping dog, and a parrot in a cage, for a trip to the beach.
But we've also met people who are afraid to go to the beach - swine flu/gripa porcina still concerns them. I saw three security guards at a bank, dressed like storm troopers, but for their white surgical masks - didn't have the nerve to take the picture, though!

Next up - shaft alignment - woohoo!

I forgot to mention some clever engine shifting ideas I came across online. One was the use of a partially inflated basketball as a roller under the engine. The other was a long lever arm, which would have enabled a pivot point where there was plenty of headroom (in the companionway for example). Thanks to a French boat with deep lockers, we were able to upgrade our strongback to a 2 1/2" pipe with a 1 1/2"shaft inside; using the crowbar for leverage, the new engine is responding well.

Spring Cleaning

2010-03-21T20:52:00.002-06:00

Looking around our new, temporary, home, here's what we see downstream. The Caribbean is down the river less than a mile away, but we're well insulated from most of its effects, it seems

and up this little branch stream - the cockpit view toward the mountains on a lovely morning. With all these fishing boats around it's easy to forget that there's a land-based nation quite near, but tonight the clouds ahead of the latest cold front are all that can be seen inland.

The views to the east and west are less romantic, but we'll get to them another time.

Meanwhile, here in the shipyard, Doug is focused on dismantling the old engine. It's sad, really, to be taking it apart simply because it wasn't modern, or might break down in mid-Pacific. Why, someone might say the same about me!

But no, I'm secure on the 'keeper' list. For one thing, I am taking advantage of all this water and space to do a thorough spring cleaning. Truth be told, it's the first thorough and methodical cleaning and re-shuffling we've done since we left a year and a half ago. I'm washing clothes, and even foul weather gear, now that I've got a small but unending trickle of fresh water. The boat was clean, by my standards, when we got it, and we haven't trashed it much. Opinions may vary, however.

The Westerbeke is looking less desirable every day. We're beginning to accumulate boxes of hoses and 'beke bits tagged with blue masking tape labels. Doug sits in there all day long scratching his head and sighing. I think we should have a de-engining ceremony, but how to design it?

The Music Whore's Over-Stuffed Ipod on shuffle offered up opera, so Doug dueted an aria Where Did This Wire Come From? and the refrain, Stop Skinning My Knuckles.

Meanwhile, outside, there's a local woman singing - if she isn't famous, she should be. She knows all the words, and what a voice! The big motor yacht with the big speakers is broadcasting a soccer game which even has me excited with every R trilled for at least five seconds. SCCCOOOORRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRREEEEEE!!!!!!!!

The Engine Has Arrived

2010-03-19T06:33:00.002-06:00

It took a little Skypeing to Miami to find out that our new Beta 43 was loaded on container #55, and container #55 was en route to Honduras. When we heard that, we moved ourselves toward La Ceiba.

As soon as we got here the heavens opened, same as last time. The river streams thick with mud, branches and trash. We don't get the full effect of the deluge outside because we're hunkered below, looking at the new leak over the hanging locker. This is how the river at Lagoon Marina looks after the rain. I'm reminded of a man we met in the mining business, a Canadian, who said that after Mitch, he took a boat up all the coastal rivers and dredged for gold in the deep pockets and bends. The coast is backed up with mountains and apparently, there's gold, and other minerals too, in them thar hills. In another of those small-world stories, he now owns the boat that we began our charter boat career on, and keeps it in Roatan.

The leak was postponed with a trash bag over the shoulders of Doug's shirt collection. Doug started ripping open the engine compartment

But he won't take begin engine disassembly without actually seeing the replacement, so we took a taxi out to Rapido Cargo for a quick peek at this wood and chipboard box which weighs 398 kilos. The shipping packages is 172 x 89 x 135H cms. Now he believes, but I'm starting to wonder exactly what's in that monstrous box - how could an engine that other people have put into this very model Valiant 40 gotten so big and heavy!

Today, we move to the shipyard and the real fun begins.

A pedestrian's view of Roatan

2010-03-12T22:16:00.021-06:00

We took a hike the other day from our anchorage at West End along the road to the nearest height (a 3-cell tower hill, plus microwave). Then we meandered down toward the beach, diverting from the main road at one of several real estate development signs.

Another diversion at a sign 'pirate bridge' took us through a lovely light-dappled woodland and gardens over a small lake on said bridge to an aviary and then toward a Monkey House. At this point we were stopped by staff (young men reclining in hammocks) and told that the monkeys were private, owned by Marcos Galinda. We backed out, wondering what great wealth could afford a private estate like this, and at how much effort was made to entertain their guests. I began to think of the estates owned by extremely wealthy Britons in the 1700 and 1800s with their trout streams, deer-hunting forests, mazes and ha-has. Mr Galinda's estate, as I saw it, had lovely trees, and mature; the 'stream' was an artificial construct of concrete, very artistic, done by a Guatemalan, perhaps the same one who did Aurora Zoo.

Eventually we reached the beach where it was revealed to us that we had just toured the GumbaLimba Recreational Park. Turns out that 'private' meant 'public, if you've paid the fee'.Had we arrived at the Pirate Bridge via the Zipline which we saw up on the road, or the next day when a cruise ship was in, we'd have been welcomed with open arms, as upwards of $50 was extracted from our pockets for the zip line part.

We had planned to have lunch somewhere on the beach at West Bay, a resort area thick with tourists. So we strolled along, feeling pretty out of place among the sunbakers with our tans and real clothes. We must have looked out of place too, because it wasn't long before we were accosted by security guards. Turned out that this stumble was into an all-inclusive resort, and we looked like the kind of folks who might eat someone else's meal. The beach itself, 15 feet back from the water, is open to everyone, but there we were, suspiciously trying to skulk along the wall in the shade, without our plastic wristbands.

Roatan wants the cruise ship tourist business, but beyond diving and beach activities, there's not all that much to do. So there's this artificial shopping village built by Carnival Cruise Lines; other ships which dock in Coxen Hole are pretty rapidly whisked away to some beach, or to the GumbaLimba Recreational Park. One day we tried to anchor in the cruise ship bay, Dixon Cove, but it's all channel.

If you push your luck, you'll end up here.

Canopy tours via zipline are getting popular - hang from a wire in a harness, wearing thick gloves for brakes, and glide from pole to thickly padded pole at leaf-top level. I was hoping I could hang out on the wire with the birds for a while, but apparently 'zip' is the operative speed, so I haven't done it (yet).

Also on Roatan is a privately 'home'built owner-operated 2 passenger plus pilot deep-sea submersible Idabel that will take you 2000 feet down into the Cayman Trench if you'd care to go. I'd be interested, but I think prices begin at about $600 per person. This submarine went into the trench that was going to be used for dredge spoil dumping as the cruise ship dock was built, just to see what they were covering up. Stanley.submarines.com

Caged birds and monkeys are perpetual attractions. I'm starting to think that there are more scarlet macaws behind chain link or chicken wire than free in trees. I felt terrible to see this young toucan though, especially after I was told that it was the last of three - "they're hard to keep, and can't digest seeds" Oscar told me. I felt like saying, well, why do you have it then? But I know better, don't I! Don't I?

Had to check on what a ha=ha actually is: from the Dictionary of Architecture and Landscape Architecture. In landscape-gardening, a boundary to a garden designed not to interrupt a view from e.g. a country-house. It consists of a ditch with side or revetment nearest the viewpoint perpendicular (or slightly battered), faced with brick or stone, and the other side sloped and turfed. It kept animals away from the area contiguous to the house, yet was concealed.

Coxen Hole 2

2010-03-02T22:06:00.001-06:00

Of course we didn't get robbed in Coxen Hole despite what the cruising guide said. So don't believe everything you read! It's a clean and friendly place, with a character totally unaffected by Disneyfication.
Maybe it used to be a little rough, but with tourism being such a big part of Roatan's economy, they can't afford any incidents.

Our specific missions in the 'Big Smoke' were to buy a 30 amp female Hubbell receptacle and some gasket material suitable for hatches. We couldn't find either and can easily do without both, but we rather like the process of exploration. We covered some ground and got handed off between a dozen nice folks. We did our part to amuse and entertain them with our linguistic efforts and general appearance.

Finding a working ATM machine isn't too hard, if you stick with a local whose cell phone brings in the up-to-the-second status of each of the five machines in town.
Sometimes the machine is 'en malo estado' and sometimes it's the operator. I used the English menu, which asked me to state the amount of money I wanted 'in units of one hundred'. So I erased '4000' lempira, and put in 40, since I wanted that many 100 lempira notes. But of course the machine just stood stubbornly until I gave it the answer it wanted, not the over-analyzed answer I was contemplating. Next time maybe I'll use the Spanish menu.
UPDATE: after a recent case of ATM fraud in the Rio Dulce, word is circulating that only people who use the English menu have a problem. All the more reason to stick to the Spanish menu, if true.

We have our snacks on the street. I'm really getting to like these mangos, cucumbers, radishes and other cut fruits and vegs sold in these little bags for fifty cents or so.The vendor adds salt and ground pumpkin seeds, a squeeze of lime or vinegar, and sometimes hot sauce. (although now that I look carefully, these are pictures of chili peppers, which no amount of lime juice could tame)
And I'd eat a lot more oranges if they were peeled for me like this.

The Port Captain graciously amended our cruising permit with his Underwood typewriter. At this office, the broom closet and the alcoves are stacked with neat bundles of permits from previous decades. By 2004 they were building shelves above the windows for the overflow. In three months, our permit will have expired, but apparently its shadow will live forever.

The school children are kept locked up: not really, but don't cross this woman! There are soldiers behind her, further inside. They are dressed in arctic-looking gray/white camoflage and some look like very recent graduates.

I almost forgot to mention that for three straight days we were treated to some great acrobatic flying by a pair of bi-planes and a red 'trainer' whose wings read Fagen. Are they famous somewhere? Triple axels and reverse flips, just like in the Olympics. There are advantages to these airport anchorages.

Just like us, spectators trying to stay in the shade.

Holing up In Coxen Hole

2010-02-25T22:13:00.001-06:00

West End, Roatan, as mellow a pot-holed one-road little tourist town as it is, is no place to be in a strong westerly wind, like the one that is coming with the latest 'strong, fast-moving' cold front. This one is 'closing down the East Coast from Philadelphia to Boston' says Armed Forces Radio.

The reef at West End is too deep to afford protection. The marine park protects its turtle grass by requesting visitors to use their moorings, but some of them are not well-installed. So each of the dozen or so boats moved out this morning. But no one else came to Coxen Hole, other than the one already here.

I wonder why not? Might have something to do with a cruising guide reference to a 'seedy eyesore of a town...dusty...unremarkable...not recommended...if you leave your boat unattended you will be robbed.' Not sure if I need an attendant to leave the boat, or if the boat will be robbed, or what.

I'm guessing none of this is really true. Blanket comments like these, both in praise and in condemnation, need a lot of seasoning. Sometimes you meet nicer people and have a better time in the unexpected places. So here we are, tucked in snugly across the small bay from the main street, waiting for the wind to come.

Coxen Hole, named for a 17th century 'mariner'/pirate captain, is the 'big city' business and political center of Roatan, indeed of all the Bay Islands. Yachts need to clear in and out here, but generally come by taxi from somewhere else to do it.
Cruise ships are coming here too, but most of the passengers are whisked away to 'snorkel-scursions' 'beach days' 'island tours' 'zip-line canopy tours' etc.

We'd have preferred anchoring on the north side of the harbor, but there looks to be shipping activity there. Good thing we left it clear. The New Star had a hard time getting his anchor up, even with his 7-man 'windlass' and he got quite a bit closer to us before breaking free.

The heralded screaming cold front, which did in fact carry a good forty knots at times, blew all night long, but thanks to our 33-kg Rocna and lots of scope, we maintained our position about 75 feet from the end of the airport runway, and from a pile of half-built block houses and half-collapsing wooden houses on the waterfront.

We've been to Coxen Hole by bus, and found it worthy of further study. Tomorrow my attendant and I will go ashore, and see if we can't prove the naysayers wrong.

Space Shuttle

2010-02-22T07:24:00.002-06:00

What a thrill! Last night, purely by chance, we happened to see in the western sky the space shuttle Endeavor as it was descending towards its landing at the Kennedy Space Center less than a quarter hour later. Under a filling crescent moon it drew a fast, bold, unwavering golden line across the clear dark sky as it passed stage left to stage right in probably less than a minute.

Jaded as we 21st-centenarians are, we theorized only a ‘military jet’ would be so fast, and so high as to be lit hours after sunset. But the moments of mystery and wonder were attenuated. Someone in the anchorage knew the details right away and broadcast them on the VHF: Endeavor returning home after a two-week flight to the International Space Station. Ordinary con-trails in the sky are starting to give me the creeps, but I’m glad I saw this.

Also aloft, perhaps, is our long-awaited new Beta 43 engine, which is scheduled to arrive in Miami, by air (incongruous, eh?), on Tuesday. There are still a number of hoops and hurdles to be negotiated before we meet face-to-fanbelt, but we are more than ready to get this project moving, and completed.

Now: Night Watch, Memoir of a Passage

2010-02-10T20:05:00.001-06:00

Suzanne Knecht may not be quite typical of the cruisers we're meeting in the Western Caribbean these days - heaven forbid that any of us be typical of anything!

There are several similarities, though. She's a middle-aged woman who cruised in large part to be supportive of her lawyer husband. They bought their boat - a Moody 42 center cockpit - new, and had it professionally outfitted. They departed as part of a fleet cruise, although they were the only ones who actually finished on schedule. A friend served as full-time crew, and they had regular visitors too. The entire circumnavigation took just two years. Suzanne missed her grandchildren and her dog. And when she got back to San Francisco, she said, only partly in jest: "We've done it, and now I never have to sail under this bridge again."

Suzanne's book is a little light on some details; she's more interested in people and places than on how the boat accomplishes its chores. I imagine her perched upon a flying carpet, well separated from the nuts and bolts of the enabling mechanism. Night Watch was just a tool; for Blue and Dot, who built D'Vara from the ground up, the connection was more intimate.

The Moody of course has an auxiliary diesel engine, which could easily be twenty times the horsepower of D'Vara's. Night Watch carried 85 gallons of diesel, so the motoring range at a guess would be maybe 5-600 miles, and they never ran out.

This 1992 vessel has a watermaker, solar panels, and Autohelm self-steering linked to a Global Positioning System. It's got two showers and two heads equipped with pressure water and a hot water heater. The galley, like D'Vara's has a fridge; also Night Watch has a freezer, maybe even a microwave and stuff like blenders and mixers. Maybe it's even got a generator. All the conveniences of home, other than space, you might say. Convenience-wise, I'd say D'Vara was more like camping, or living in the back of a VW camper.

I'll bet there's an 'most-weather' plastic-windowed enclosure over Night Watch's center cockpit, making for a relatively high and dry watch station. Aboard D'Vara standing a watch likely meant out in the open, hands on the tiller time. I'd assume that the sail inventory and running rigging is complete and entirely synthetic; in two years nothing rotted or frayed or even showed signs of wear, at least that Suzanne mentioned. Probably nothing needed replacing underway and I don't think anyone went up the mast either, at least in an emergency.

As a travelogue, having circumnavigated along the same basic route, and come to many of the same conclusions about certain destinations myself, I found Suzanne's book interesting reading. Reading it, you can tell her book is self-published, but decently done. Thankfully, her personality is more savory than sugar; she's not a whiner but also not afraid to glare. She's the kind of woman I'd make a beeline to chat with if I saw her at a cocktail party, to enjoy her sharp and pertinent observations, and the others too!

Compare/contrast: The Bradfields aboard D'Vara worked long and hard to get safely through the dreaded Torres Straits at the top of Australia. They were intimidated and hampered by uncertain tides and currents, squalls, missing sextant sights.Night Watch, on the other hand, arrived there at night, yet decided to continue on through in the dark of night, rather than wait for daylight visibility.

Suzanne, acting as navigator, marked up a chart with courses and bearings, then entered waypoints into the GPS to double-check her calculations. The GPS set the route that the Autohelm then steered in the dark night through the barely awash sandbars, rocks, wrecks and myriad other hazards that have brought these waters their dire reputation. Of the four people standing watches that night, two never touched the wheel. It was an intense night, but I'll bet Dot could tell Suzanne something further about intensity.

Possibly, unspoken in the background, was the thought that if Night Watch did get in trouble, they could enlist some of their technology(the liferaft for one!). They could call for help, search, rescue, pickup - and get it- from the Australian Coast Guard or other shipping. Dot and Blue would have been on their own, and knew it, which may have clarified their minds thoroughly.

Parenthetically I'll add that aboard Galivant, we have a GPS, which gets our (presumably) exact position from satellites. And we have an Autohelm (an electrical arm attached to a compass brain which steers the boat on the set course while motoring). We also have a (Monitor brand)windvane, which steers when the sails are up and drawing, responding to keep the boat in its same relationship to the wind, rather than mindlessly toeing the same straight line despite changing conditions as the Autohelm does. We do not allow the two latter to speak to the GPS: "the Cabots speak only to the Lowells and the Lowells speak only to God".

The idea that a machine would be in charge throughout the difficult Torres Straits passage gives me the chills. But to be fair, these steering devices, the electrical Autohelm and the mechanical windvane, are probably more reliable and accurate than most people at the helm, including me. In fact, the helmsperson is perhaps more free to look around, check bearings, etc. And the GPS may be a better calculator than a person. It's a bit of a snob thing, and I should get over it! Or never fly again. Actual humans were involved in actually checking the data, and undistractable machines did what we think they do best.

Would the Bradfields have been pleased to make their passages aboard the Moody with its electronics and luxurious accommodation? Perhaps, is my guess, especially if they weren't paying the bills! But not necessarily. They were totally involved, had what they wanted, and the satisfaction of working as a well-oiled unit. Would Suzanne be a happy camper on D'Vara? Not for long.

What exactly is gained or lost when the emphasis shifts to comfort and a tick-mark on the bucket list? In the intervening 40-odd years, perhaps some of us have lost the knack of divining our way by the hairs on our neck, the clouds in the sky and the swirling tea-leaves of the ocean, not to mention the Pub. 249 tables, the jerry jug and the sculling oar. Living and travelling on a sailboat these days is easier and more comfortable. When "the fleet" gathers, the talk is mainly of obtaining and maintaining creature comforts and technological assistance.

Something is gained, but something is lost. I can't quite say what either of those things might be. Is it biased to say that people who know less can accomplish more now? That's not necessarily a bad thing. Still, I admire more the people who worked harder to do what I am doing today, even while I don't necessarily want to work that hard. I do think all this reliance on machines and electronics can dumb the people behind them down, at least in the skills that used to be important. Just another of life's little compromises.

Then: Road to the Sea

2010-01-31T22:30:00.002-06:00

I sometimes make fun of the yachting writers, especially of yore, for their insistence on describing every single tack, gybe, windshift and sail change. I'd rather hear about the places they saw, the people they met, and particularly in this case, the person they sailed with! But books about sea voyages,the ones by the Hiscocks, Joshua Slocum, Miles and Beryl Smeeton, etc. are what nurtured my interest in the cruising life,

Two books I've read recently illustrate just how times have changed in the last fifty-odd years. They both remind me that I could be blown back to the Stone Age at any moment and should/oughta brush up on my dead reckoning skills. I see that Doug holds an open 'Celestial Navigation' as his nap approaches. Ah, intent is a start, but will we persevere?

The "Then" version is Road to the Sea, published in 1964. S.E.(Blue) Bradfield was an Australian in his 30s who spent 2 1/2 years building a 30' jarrah-wood wishbone ketch in his parents' backyard near Perth. On their shakedown/breakdown cruise in 1958 Blue, with his wife Dot, (who had never left sheltered waters in a yacht), barely missed several reefs, ran into a tropical cyclone on a lee shore, hand-steered and changed sails constantly, climbed the mast after lost halyards, fell on beam ends and flooded the cabin, and generally had quite a time of it, all before leaving Australian waters.

D'Vara's Egyptian cotton sails blew out a year later, but were reckoned to have lived a full life. There was an engine, (several eventually, since each had major problems), a 3 hp air-cooled gasoline engine, with a 5 gallon fuel tank. There was a paraffin (kerosene) stove and fridge. Dot cooked up fish and chips, date tarts, and other dainties, hand-steered, and seems to have done everything else too, except maybe engine work, mast climbing and celestial navigation. Other than the occasional sly remark, though, she's only crew in this book.

Two eighteen gallon water tanks, but the boat was often too salty to catch extra rainwater. Stowage for spare canvas and ropes. Three months' worth of flour and sugar, rice and spaghetti. Greased eggs and painted tin cans. A collapsible dinghy that had to be bolted together. Trade goods, like safety razors, sticks of tobacco, even old toothbrushes, in exchange for fruit, yams, lobsters, chickens on the 'hoof'.

For navigation, there was a sextant (which had to be checked before each outing), pocket watch, lead-line and taffrail log, paper, pencil (and eraser). Half (well, I exaggerate) the book is about climatic conditions disrupting sights and the uncertainties of dead reckoning in inclement weather. Reading the gory navigational details of their passage through the reef- and current- encumbered Torres Straits at the top of Australia made ME anxious and weary! I'm pretty sure it would have been easy to sell Blue, and Dot, a satellite navigator, at pretty much any price, had such an instrument been available then.

While they often had to hand-steer, they eventually worked out a generally satisfactory sail and tiller-lashing self-steering balance.

Blue and Dot stopped to work en route, but pass over these interludes discreetly. No doubt he was thrilled to sell his book, which despite all that discussion of wind direction, is nicely written, gracefully told account. Also, it's a cultural window into its era: believe it or not, bureaucracy in Belize or Mexico, for example, is downright streamlined compared to the colonial bureaucracy of the 1950s. The Bradfields were also forced to stay ashore under armed guard for arriving in Indonesia without the right piece of paper.

When they arrived in England in 1963, via the Red Sea and French canals, they went to work again. I know from Google that they eventually headed back towards Australia via the Caribbean and Panama Canal, and wrote another book.

"Our way of life is best and we can't wait to get back to it", is where this book ends, or should. Blue also announced, via the end notes on the cover, that Dot was a "'fair dinkum' sailor who has proved herself capable of looking after D'Vara under most conditions. She can also cook."

Mr Canute

2010-01-31T19:23:00.004-06:00

It used to be that Doug reminded people of Crocodile Dundee, at least while he was wearing his straw Shady Brady. After maybe 10 years of regular use, that hat is decorating the head of a mule somewhere, perhaps. Doug's current brimmed hat has mesh crown sides and a tight stitched cloth brim. Maybe that's why he now looks like a man known in Bonaccatown, Guanaja, Bay Islands, as Mr. Canute.
IS THAT MR CANUTE?

His real name was Mr. Norman Knudsen, and we learned more about him from a pair of men sitting in plastic chairs in front of a hardware store on the main sidewalk/drag. "Hello, Mr. Canute", they said. "Good day" replied Doug, not sure what they had said or (in the Bay Islands it's a reasonable question) which language they were speaking. "Mr. Canute?"

They said that Mr Canute built a house out behind Dunbar Rock. He was an American from New Orleans, who had come to Guanaja for many years, and he liked white bread and beer. Turns out that Doug even walks down the street like Mr.Canute. "The younger Mr. Canute, of course."
MR CANUTE'S HOUSE
On the other side of the bay, in the little German bar behind the containers on the beach, I started to tell this story by mentioning Mr. Canute, and the first thing the German and a local customer said was "As soon as I saw him coming in the door, I thought that was Mr. Canute."

Unfortunately, at least for the real Mr. Canute, he's dead. His wife or daughter still comes down to the house, but isn't there now. Still, it's interesting, especially in such a small place, to be mistaken for a popular, or at least known, character. Makes me wonder how often it happens unbeknownst to us, and how Mr. Canute would feel about his white-bread-and-beer legacy. At least he's fondly remembered.

Or so I thought. Next night, at a party, someone asked me if I was with the man who looked like Mr. Canute. Yes, I am, I said. What can you tell me about him?
Oh he was a real pirate.
Do tell, I said, come sit with me.
My informant was an inebriated German, so he submitted to my grilling about the life and times of Mr. Canute.
'Maybe it was in the 1960s when Mr. Canute came to Guanaja. At that time you could stake out land for cattle-grazing simply by driving stakes in the ground and registering it with the municipality. Nobody cared what you did. You could buy acres and acres for $500. Mr. Canute took lots of land. Then he started selling the land. The buyers started having problems with the papers, but Mr. Canute had the money. But all this it is okay with the locals, because they are pirates too!"
UPDATE: another story about Mr. Canute, told to me by a diver who's been here since the 1970s. "Mr Canute was one of the early sat(uration) divers on the oil rigs. There were a couple of them around here back then, and one day I heard a conversation between two of them. He said "I met you at a bouray in New Orleans a couple years ago. In fact, I'm the one who won your Cadillac in that poker game."
For an update about the dangers of containers, as mentioned in the Kersti post of ?Dec. 1, check this link:
http://www.palmbeachpost.com/news/state/containers-fall-off-ship-drift-toward-west-palm-200130.html

Net Control

2010-01-19T21:56:00.002-06:00

Put half a dozen cruising boats in the same vicinity and pretty soon there will be a VHF or SSB radio net. Here we’re under the aegis of the Northwest Caribbean Net, meeting on 6209 USB at 1400 UTC, 0800 local time, covering Isla Mujeres to San Andres and Providencia, and sometimes beyond.

There are people who love the nets. I’m one of them. It’s like getting a local newspaper full of information, business, gossip; and it’s always such a revelation to match the voice personality to the vessel if you do ever come across them.

And there are people who hate the nets. I’m one of them too. Endless holiday greetings and blathering on about restaurants and pets, people who don’t listen and fail to communicate, people whose act is not together. Sometimes I find myself shouting at the radio “That’s not what she said!” or “Pay attention!”

So now, I’m the net controller, the mouth behind the mike myself. Apparently I have the radio signal and the voice for it, and, being, I'm told, a bossy older sister, also the training. Tuesday mornings at 8 you’ll find me at the chart table, which has been cleaned off so everything can be written down, pencils sharpened, script propped before me, mike in hand, and as the GPS ticks to the top of the hour, I introduce myself and ask everyone to listen for emergency or priority traffic. It’s all downhill from there.

Vessels underway check in with position reports– today was busy with 12. Boats are going north to Isla Mujeres, and coming south from there; with a new moon high tide they’re coming out of the Rio Dulce; a break in the weather opens windows out of Providencia and San Andreas, and there are short hops in Belize and the Bay Islands too.
“Any relays for vessels I’m not hearing?”

You wouldn’t think it would be so entertaining to watch these little amoebas gliding off across a microscope slide; maybe it’s more like the weird fascination of watching the Weather Channel. We have one of those too, a cruiser who downloads NOAA and other sources and broadcasts the results to the fleet. He’s the single most popular and effective member of this community, although sometimes the forecast and the actual weather are marching to different drummers.
“Fills needed on the weather? Come now.”

Next comes the section called QSTs – basically: what do you need? Information? Parts? Got something to buy, sell or trade? On my days, this section runs together with general check-ins. ‘Wait to be recognized!’

“Jeff’s selling spare parts from his outboard that was stolen before Christmas. Randy’s got a VHF. Are there markers in that pass? Anyone have a phone number for the shipyard? Bob had a ‘4-foot long thick-bodied snake’ on the anchor when he arrived from mainland Belize to an outer cay.” (This is unusual!)

Next check-in, come now. Okay, I've got Windquest, My Way, and one other, all together. Windquest, go.

“Be aware that the Port Captain in Coxen Hole, Roatan, speaks better English than he lets on. New green channel marker at West End, Roatan. Is my radio better today? Can anyone carry a package from Port Royal to Utila? To Cuba? I don’t think we got an accurate measurement when we got diesel the other day, and it was poor quality. We’re still here in French Harbor, no traffic. I’d like to talk to xxx after the net….”

It goes on like that for half an hour or so, until “one last call for check-ins for the Northwest Caribbean Net”. I like to imagine people "reading the mail" as they drink coffee, wash the dishes, brush their teeth; plotting the course of their day with the net in the background. But on Tuesdays, I hope they're not yelling at the radio, or at least, not at me. I’ve done what I can to "facilitate communications among vessels”, until next week. “Thanks, everyone, for participating. The net is now closed and the frequency available for general use.”

Diving in Roatan

2010-01-05T17:26:00.001-06:00

Sounds like North America is having quite the winter. Just so you don't think we're just lotus-eaters down here in the tropics, I'll report that your big strong cold fronts drag their tails down here, bringing squally showers, gusty winds and chilly blanket and baking weather. Right now we've both got colds.
But in the two halcyon days which followed Christmas, we did some actual SCUBA diving. What's great about Roatan is how convenient this is - the shore is lined with dive sites easy to get to by dinghy. Some you can even walk to, like the wreck of the Prince Albert, which lies (was placed, actually) in the channel between the two nearest resorts, CocoView and Fantasy Island.
In towns like West End, dive shops are the mainstay of the main street.
In the giddy early days of a regular paycheck (thank you Fitz!), we bought a SuperSnorkel hookah rig, basically a lawnmower engine running a compressor feeding two 40-ft hoses with regulators. We haven't used it nearly as much as we'd planned, since storage and access issues were insurmountable. In fact, it spent most of its life in our storage shed. Now in Roatan, it's coming into its own (we store it in the cockpit), but it's also for sale, and being replaced by our single new BC, dive tank and regulator. We'll pay to rent the other stuff when a place like Mary's Place comes along.

from Roatan Dive Guide, by Ignacio Gonzales
UPDATE: As you can see this is a nice dive guide, and a second edition expanded and updated is now available at
http://sites.google.com/site/m%E2%80%8Bardiveguides/
This crevice was formed by volcano, or earthquake? aeons ago and was only 5' wide in places. We went down to 97 feet where the colors are generally gone but still, the cobalt void spread endlessly beyond.
Another dive took us to a wall, half of which had 'slumped' in last year's earthquake. Probably, at 2AM, no one was there for that experience. And we saw a couple wrecks - Doug's favorite because 'there's something to see, not just fish and coral over and over again.'

Or a pair of lobsters.
In case you wondered what the inside of a dive tank looks like: this one is engraved with a story about how it exploded - fire and the proximity of 35 other tanks were involved.

All underwater photos taken by Wally Larsen.

http://www.answers.com/topic/lotophagi for definition of lotus eater - more apt than I'd expected!

Utila

2009-12-31T12:30:00.000-06:00

There are three Bay Islands of Honduras, of which Utila is the nearest to the coast, and the first one you come to from the Rio Dulce. It, like the other Bay Islands, is part of an underground mountain range, fringed by coral reefs. Utila has signs of volcanic activity at Pumpkin Hill, but most of the island has a limestone base, and is, as the chart describes it, low and swampy. It's about 8 1/2 miles long and not more than 3 miles wide. We rode around a goodly portion of it on our folding bikes and I had a leisurely climb of Pumpkin Hill.

The town of Utila has two parts: the main concrete road runs along the shore for traffic consisting of golf carts, ATVs, bicycles, strollers, skateboards, and, just to mix things up, the occasional pickup truck or van. There's a ferry dock; that's how everything gets here.

And there are restaurants and bars, hardware stores and groceries, cell phone stores and ATMs, all the usual paraphernalia of modern life, but small, the size appropriate to a place with maybe 7-8000 people. Special to Utila and the Bay Islands are dive shops and realtors, both with an eye toward the modern galleons bearing cash in their pockets. It's a pleasant island tending along the lines of the Abacos, or Carriacou, or Bequia, and popular with backpacker/divers.

Up the hill is the village proper, while the gringos are building out of town mostly along the coast, mowing down the mangroves and clearcutting the groundcover for their stateside- sized casas. But apparently the locals too have been building for some time:

For more than a century, islanders have continuously augmented their beach front by "making land". The original shoreline of Utila, only a few yards deep from the high water mark, has been extended in many places an additional thirty to forty yards or more by filling in fenced rectangles of water with refuse and broken coral. Houses that were poised on pilings over eight feet of water some sixty or seventy years ago now sit on terra firma and the process goes on--giving portions of the harbor a Venetian effect--even though the cost is high in money and labor. Land making in the swamp areas has been pursued in like manner, one barrio in the community being named Holland to commemorate its origin through reclamation.

http://www.aboututila.com/UtilaInfo/Money-Order-Economy/Chapter-3.htm#3-Geology

Hiding from a south and west wind that made a mess of the main harbor, we anchored a few days between Utila and a cay-community at SucSuc and Pigeon Cays. Buildings huddle together on crooked pilings over land barely above sea level, and every porch is a dock. This, I'm told, was in fact the site of Utila's earliest British settlement. Can't figure out why anyone would chose this damp pied-a-terre when they could have the hillside, now or then. But I am coming to suspect that the presence of no-see-'ums had something to do with it.
Another surprise was being greeted in English, a pretty and picturesque form of it. Come to find out that the Bay Islands were British during the early part of the 1800s; a lot of the settlers had names like Jones and McNab, Bush and Cooper, Jackson and Thompson, and several came via the Cayman Islands. Although Honduras took formal possession around 1860, it is said that some residents didn't realize anything had changed until Queen Victoria died in 1901. Here's how they saw it two hundred years ago.
Gradually mainland Hondurans have come out to the Bay Islands, but we still met people who spoke only one language or the other. And then there's a Garifuna presence - these are the slaves forcibly removed from St. Vincent in the 1790s and dumped in the Bay Islands, from whence they have spread to Belize and coastal Honduras. I think they have a language of their own, but use the other two. I tried asking a Garifuna woman for something in Spanish, and as she was showing me, she finally said "Don't you speak English?"

One of the neatest places I've ever seen is a hotel/restaurant/bar called the Jade Seahorse. Owned by, I'm told, glass bead artists from Israel, the entire property is a riot of color and texture, not just the glass grottoes and encrustations, but the cabins and carpentry as well. "Makes me want to go home and get artsy" said Doug. "I seem to be a little conservative."

Christmas

2009-12-25T01:53:00.003-06:00

When Santa comes to Roatan, it's not a silent night, and probably not particularly holy either. At least at French Harbor, his acolytes began at midnight, setting off firecrackers and bottle rockets, and cranking up the music. From the V-berth, those jingle bells are heavy on bass, and Santa sounds like he's in an increasingly frantic race.

Until now, I had been sleeping the sleep of the well-fed. What a feast we had with friends on another boat: G called it 'Christmas lunch' although we ate at sundown on Christmas Eve. Turkey, cranberry sauce, roast potatoes, 'courgettes', and more. It all looked so nice on the plate and was cooked to perfection. And then, when we were sated, out came the Christmas pudding - nothing Jello about it, but rather an thick, dark, concentrated mound, anembarras de richesse with a primal connection via the taste buds back through Dickens and Austen to the medieval heart of darkness from whence, in my mind anyhow, the Christmas holiday originates. Anything that happens on Christmas day will be an anti-climax to this meal!

Out in the main cabin of Galivant, there are no stockings, no decorations, no milk and cookies. At least I didn't put them there! I know for a fact that Santa brought Doug a small bottle of fou-fou rum, and for me, a nice chunk of real Parmesan cheese, as he has for several years now.

The weather here at present is fine. We'll have a swim along the reef in the morning, then another feast; this time a cruiser's pot luck featuring grilled turkey, the potatoes I've been assigned to bring, and more (I hope), plus 'lots of desserts'. Then this day too will fade into the ranks of Christmases past. To all, I wish the best of the season, wherever you may be.

Lionfish. They're Here.

2009-12-10T15:37:00.001-06:00

Making casual conversation in a dive shop at West End, Roatan, I commented on a poster requesting info on lionfish Pterois volitans/miles sightings, and was astonished by the response.

Oh yes, the store personnel said, that newsletter is from October, when we had about fifty, but we had a lot more last month. In the last couple months it's suddenly gotten much worse. We've seen them while snorkeling in 4 feet of water, and way down deep, and everywhere in between. They went on to theorize that a large number of fertilized eggs, or juvenile fish, had drifted from sites further east in the Caribbean.

In case this issue has flown beneath your radar, the story is that lionfish, natives to the Pacific, probably escaped from a Florida aquarium during Hurricane Andrew. They've been coming for some time, and now, according to this map, they're everywhere.

These fish might have trouble overwintering in colder areas, but the guys in the dive shop told me in Roatan's waters, they spawn 30,000 eggs at a time and can breed monthly. They eat the juveniles of numerous reef species, including the ones who keep the reef clean, compete for resources, and have a nasty venomous spine which makes them unattractive to the human fishers. In fact, if you do get stung, you probably won't die, but you will be in pain for a month, and the best remedy is to pour hot water on the site. Lionfish are said to be tasty, if you cut out the poison sac under the spine. They apparently just sit still and look at you, so aren't particularly hard to get.

I'm certain it's a terrible thing, but there are so many terrible things of the same nature. The Burmese python in Florida, the giant carp approaching the Great Lakes, just for starters. A person could begin to suffer from Terrible Thing Overload Syndrome.

What particularly interested me was the response. "Does everyone carry spear guns to shoot them with on sight?" I asked. No, ma'am, they do not. There seem to be three reasons why not. One, they don't want spear guns in the marine park, although presently the divemaster is allowed to have one on the boat. Two, they are there to conserve and preserve, and blasting fish in front of paying scuba divers is not the ideal image. Three, they, or someone in the larger reef management world, are concerned about humane treatment of the fish. The recommended method is to catch the fish - this involves a plastic bag behind the fish, and a stick in front of the fish - and put it in ice water to numb it before it actually dies.

I can just see it now.

In Bonaire I gather they're sending out fish-killing patrols. Maybe they're doing the same here and just not admitting it. I hope so. They do hope to keep the marine park free of lionfish, but I don't think the pooper-scooper approach is going to work.

UPDATE: I met a woman involved in reef statistics who told me that a lot of the sightings were of juveniles, 1-3 inches, so you can see why they might not be spear gun material, and that they are not at this moment spewing 30,000 eggs per month. Even the intermediates, 5-6 inches, can be caught in a net, if you happen to be carrying one. But there were also a few larger fish of reproductive age. And of course, right up there with death and taxes are time and sex!
I also know snorkelers who found a lionfish on the reef in Belize. They thought it was one of the most attractive fish they had ever seen. They'll go back out next time planning to shoot to kill, but with regret.
I also noticed that the first result on my Google search was about keeping lionfish in aquariums.

Here's a little more detail on what's so terrible about these fish. The entire website is worth reading if you're interested in the issue.

Recent research by Albins and Hixon (2008) provides the first evidence of negative effects of lionfish on native Atlantic coral-reef fishes. The recruitment of coral-reef fishes was studied during the 2007 recruitment period (July-August) on small patch reefs in the Bahamas with and without a single lionfish. Over the five week period, net recruitment (i.e., accumulation of new juvenile fishes via settlement of larvae) was reduced by 79% on reefs with lionfish compared to reefs without lionfish. Stomach content analyses and observations of feeding behavior showed that reductions in native fish density were almost certainly due to predation by lionfish. ... In addition, lionfish have the potential to decrease the abundance of ecologically important species such as parrotfish and other herbivorous fishes that keep seaweeds and macroalgae from overgrowing corals.

from the Nonindigenous Aquatic Species site of the USGS http://nas.er.usgs.gov/queries/FactSheet.asp?speciesID=963

Night Passages

2009-12-02T10:37:00.005-06:00

A yacht named Kersti, was holed and sank the other night while on a passage from San Blas to Cartagena. The crew in their liferaft was picked up by another yacht sailing in company. But the boat is gone, and with it, I'm sure, the confidence and serenity of the crew, as well as all their personal stuff.

Then, a day later came the report from another vessel which had in view a "large white ship's mooring" mooring measuring about 15 feet x 20 feet, drifting around on the rhumb line from San Blas to Cartagena. The report was radioed in and apparently will reach a US Coast Guard vessel in the area, which will deal with the obstacle.

I remember one of the most frightening nights of my life - years ago, in Arion, somewhere in mid-Atlantic. We were rollicking along, headlong into one of the darkest nights (but starriest) imaginable. All I could think of was a report I'd heard about a number of refrigerated containers that had supposedly been swept off the deck of a cargo ship in a storm. I was certain that the sharp corner of one was hovering about two feet below the surface and we would be upon it at any moment. I was miserable until sunrise, and then, although the containers may still have been there, I regained my balance.

I've buried those particular containers under a pile of other things I might worry about. The other night we were moving along the coast of mainland Honduras on a mainly clear but moonless night. There was a rock and a reefy area to avoid, and an isolated rain squall, whose boundaries I checked on radar. As it passed, a persistent little blip remained just behind us, and as I looked for it, a light went on. Apparently we had nearly run over an unlit fishing boat, provoking him into showing a light. A few minutes later another light suddenly appeared maybe a quarter mile off.

Other items for the worry list include logs washed down rivers, and whales, (although if I hit a whale I'd consider that it had the right-of-way and I had just drawn the wrong card )

Of course we stand watches all night, on the coast and offshore. But it's impossible to see everything. We place a lot of faith in the odds that whatever danger lurks ahead is not directly ahead on the little line we draw across the ocean. For the men in the unlit lancha it worked out, for Kersti, it didn't. For us, well, it remains to be seen. I'm expecting the best.

UPDATE: follow these links for a bit more information about Kersti
http://www.sail-world.com/USA/Blue-Water-Rally-yacht-sinks---cruisers-to-the-rescue/63931
http://www.noonsite.com/Members/sue/R2009-12-03-1
UPDATE: read about a more recent incident of container ships going overboard here:
http://www.palmbeachpost.com/news/state/containers-fall-off-ship-drift-toward-west-palm-200130.html

Arab proverb to the effect that you don't truly own anything that you can lose at sea.
UPDATE: read about 30 containers lost in the Gulf Stream off Key West. Refrigerated containers have insulation which keeps them floating.
http://www.palmbeachpost.com/news/state/containers-fall-off-ship-drift-toward-west-palm-200130.html

La Ceiba

2009-11-29T08:01:00.000-06:00

La Ceiba is the third largest city in Honduras, and it's a pretty civilized size to my mind, meaning you can walk from the beach to the mall. Of course, that takes a while, but I like to walk and you can see a lot.

Mostly what you see is a jumble of old and new buildings. There are classic older wooden ones, but they don't stand out because of all the other busy-ness around them. There was an Art Deco period near the waterfront. Then there's the inevitable accretion of little 'mixed media' sidewalk and curbside booths. Shopping for something specific is the usual adventure into a warren of side doors and alleys; nothing is where you'd think to look for it, but compared to Fronteras, there's a lot available here.
PHOTO DOWNTOWN WIRES
We came here to check out the La Ceiba Shipyard for some engine work we're thinking of. They've been here for some time, but you wouldn't know it by the chart.
PHOTO TRACK SCREENSHOT

Looks like we'll be spending some time there in a couple months, uninstalling the 33-year old Westerbeke 40 and installing a new Beta 43.

Then a strong cold front came through and it began to rain, and rain. The river turned to mud, the streets in town turned to lakes. I was riding across the Rio Cangrejal with someone who showed me what a dinky little rain this was compared to Hurricane Mitch, which took out the bridge we were on, twenty feet above the present water level. In fact I've read that 80% of the bridges in the country had to be rebuilt.

It was Thanksgiving: I was grateful for a mere cold front and a secure mooring, among so many other things.
While others were watching turkeys in the oven, or football, we were tracking down a leak somewhere behind the headliner that was making its way into my book locker. It's harder to think like a raindrop than you might expect!
PHOTO RAIN ON BEACH

Rain seems to have stopped. Today is Election Day in Honduras. Everyone has a different take on the immediate and future prospects. It seems a good time to leave the city for the Bay Islands and watch from the bleachers instead of the front row.

Thinking about Pirates

2009-11-23T19:57:00.002-06:00

Pirates of the Caribbean: not Johnny Depp although I did hear somewhere (Armed Forces Radio, our English-language radio news source) that he is the sexiest man on the planet this week.

If I had the technology, I'd add a sound track, Elvis, 'Hunk of Burning Love' maybe.

No, I'm thinking of the mostly nameless and faceless bucaneers whose image he embellishes. We're on the Spanish Main now, aarrgh, mateys, where pirates lurked, like spiders waiting for a tasty fly to come by, in the form of gold and silver aboard a Spanish galleon.

We were in a nearly landlocked harbor on the mainland coast, Diamante Lagoon, where the hills are alive with palm trees and orange, avocado and other fruit trees that were reputedly planted by these pirates on their days off. A cell tower twinkled in the distance, but otherwise there was no one around save the occasional small local fishing boat. Their crews had little camps tucked into the mangroves, which I'm sure they were glad to disappear to on such a squally evening.

I myself had a self-indulgent evening, a glass of wine, a good Thai-style soup with coconut milk, an engrossing book. I even smoothed the bedsheets, and got out a cover for the first time in months, secure in the knowledge that nothing was likely to disturb my slumbers here.

According to one pirate captain, life was good, or at least lively, for his men too:

In an honest Service, there is thin Commons, low Wages, and hard Labour; in this, Plenty and Satiety, Pleasure and Ease, Liberty and Power; and who would not balance Creditor on this Side, when all the Hazard that is run for it, at worst, is only a sower Look or two at choaking. No, a merry Life and a short one shall be my Motto ”

—Pirate Captain Bartholomew Roberts

I tried to imagine crews of yore, hanging out in Diamante between lootings, swatting mosquitoes certainly, planting trees? Were they happy to be so securely anchored, or were they happier about other things? And how did they get some of those ships through the narrow entrance and into the lagoon which even then probably had no more than ten feet of water anywhere? Did they have time for mascara?

We also went to Omoa, near the Guatemalan border, to look at its fort, the Fortaleza San Fernando de Omoa. Reputedly the largest colonial fort in Central America, it was built by the Spanish to protect their shipping interests.It took about twenty years to build and was completed about 1776. It's a nice enough fort - along the lines of Fort Jefferson in the Dry Tortugas tho slightly smaller, and today has a museum with a fair display (spanish and english) and the usual anchors, bits of pottery, cannons etc.

I was even thinking it would make an interesting hotel. However it was, like so many forts, later used as a prison, so the vibe can't be good.

But you've got to wonder. The cannons couldn't possibly have shot with any effect from their location to where the waterfront is now - that's a whole lot of silting going on! Imagine the labor expended to build such a thing! Lime for mortar was transported in small boats 40 miles from the Sapodilla Keys (the boats kept sinking and a nearer source was found). And lime was the least of it, material-wise. The population was small, both of slaves and the men to keep them working. And the cost/benefit ratio? The place was abandoned within a few years, and twenty years after that, Spain completely lost its grip in Central America.

Omoa was also the main port of Honduras at that time. But every time I go someplace like this I'm also amazed, or maybe incredulous would be better, at how the ungainly vessels of the day could even use, much less 'develop' such terrible harbors. The anchors in the museums don't begin to look appropriate for the slab-sided ships. Omoa, although sheltered from the supposedly prevailing trade winds, is wide open to the west and north, to the cold fronts that are beginning to trail down off North America now, and to anything squally or tempestuous. So, to a lesser extent, is Puerto Cortes, which replaced Omoa. Places that look snug, like Escondido, can turn nasty when the wind goes west and builds, and there would be no tacking out.

It's all just unimaginable. But I'm trying! If a time machine comes along before I depart, I'd want to sign up.

The sea now is actually a couple hundred yards away, and the fort is next door to a natural gas offshore loading place.

OMOA FISHING PIER
Nothing to do with pirates, but this is pretty much all the action in Omoa these days. Your imagination might also conjure up the ghost of the Fantome, the Windjammer ship so famously lost at sea during Hurricane Mitch, which picked up its passengers here, I've read.

PS apologies to anyone who got emailed with a post from back in July. No, we're not going into reruns. I don't know what happened. Let's just say we had a mouse going rogue.

Toward Puerto Cortes

2009-11-17T09:39:00.027-06:00

While the bulk of our cohort scatters for the US or the laid-back English-speaking Bay Islands (Roatan, Utila, Guanaja), we droned east along the coast of mainland Honduras on a windless day, thinking that some paint we ordered in Puerto Cortes might have arrived there.
Flat calm had its rewards - a pod of dolphins stayed to play for 15 or 20 minutes. PHOTO DOLPHINS And I swear the one in the middle kept rolling over to look at me.

An interesting book I read last year, Beautiful Minds: The Parallel experiences of Dolphins and the Great Apes, or something like that, made the point, among others, that despite their intelligence, dolphins are sort of 'stuck' evolutionarily, because neither their bodies nor their environment offer the 'advancement opportunities' that the great apes have received in their jungles. That might have been Stephen Hawkings looking up at me with the key to the universe, were I capable of receiving it!

I did my best to emote empathy and encouragement, but the dolphins moved on anyhow.

And so did we, anchoring in the slanting late afternoon light in the southeast corner of the bay, a big port operation on one side, Navy base ahead, and a beach on the other side, mountains beyond, yellow quarantine flag flying.
ANOTHER DOLPHIN PHOTO, the boat and I are also reflected, and my technology tool, created from mined, processed, transported and fabricated materials, by opposable thumbs.

Doug is a believer in evolution: "It's made me what I am today", he says.

Lifting the curtain on Honduras

2009-11-17T09:39:00.026-06:00

MAP
We spent part of the morning clearing in at the industrial shipping port of Puerto Cortes, with the assistance of our new friend, Flash, who spent ten years as a long-haul trucker out of Boston. He met us at the dock; at first we couldn't shake him, and then we didn't really want to. We could see that the officials all knew and liked him, so we just went with the flow, and had a pleasant time of it. Although, when we went back the next day, we found out he had stiffed his friend the dinghy minder.
And I spent part of the morning in line in the bank, trying to get smaller change for the 500 Lempira notes (about $25) that the ATM spit out. That no one ever has change, so you need your own, is a basic tenet of travel almost everywhere. So I stood in line, observing my fellow patrons and the action on the street - also watching an automated revolving security door spit people back into the lobby for various perceived infractions. It got me three times, once for my big bag, once for my little bag, and once for my hat, I think. Finally the door let me in carrying nothing more than the wallet and the four bills. I left with almost half an inch of paper: there is paper money for the equivalent of a nickel.

Unlike in Fronteras, there was not a Mayan-dressed woman in sight. Here the population is mixed, ladino or mestizo, and most people approach, even exceed, my own height. Wearing glasses! Styled hair, not just long black ponytails. Short haircuts. Many more people speak some English and will approach us for a friendly chat. We were told twice that 80 percent of the school children take some English. Men especially have been in the US, sometimes in the shipping ports of New Orleans, Miami and New York. Lots of bicycles and 'freelance' driving. And the bananas sold on the street are the big ones we're used to in the US, Gros Michel or its successor, still yellow.

Also no machetes in sight, and while the roosters still crow, the howler monkeys have been replaced by barking dogs and sometimes traffic noise.
We had a beer with a trio of young men, Omar, Alex and Anibal who told us that times were tight, nobody had work, be careful of bad guys, that they weren't all bad, they just needed to feed their families even in a 'crise economico'. Then one cell phone rang and they all pulled phones from their pockets and had a laugh about whether it should be answered, being from, I gather, some woman about some baby.

The town itself is pretty undistinguished and could use a general trash pickup, but people were accommodating and we enjoyed our visit.
PHOTO XMAS TREE
This will be the town Christmas tree, and only a major port would have one like it. It's made like baggy wrinkle from bits of the polypropylene line - a blend of colors that ends up being greenish enough.

Back in Salt Water

2009-11-13T12:36:00.001-06:00

We got out of the Rio Dulce yesterday, before the flag police decreed we needed a new one! We crossed the bar with a few inches to spare, and almost enough daylight to make a snug anchorage, Graciosa, across the Bahia Honduras, almost before a rainy squall arrived. Two boats behind us motored out while a local cabin cruiser held them heeled over via a line from the masthead - interesting to watch, although I'd hate to have to go that way myself!
Onwards, towards Honduras, but first a lazy day.

2009-11-11T00:10:00.002-06:00

Life in the Slow Lane
This is a test (more successful than previous attempts, I hope) of sending emails to the blog via the HF radio and a Pactor modem. I plan to come back and add pictures when the Internet is available.

We broke the marina force field ten days ago, although we did go back again later in the evening for the Halloween party. But then we had boxes on our heads, so it was different. PHOTO OF HALLOWEEN BOX HEADS HERE,.
Photo by Jim Ellis

Mainly what we left, aside from the cool refreshing pool and the so-welcome shelter of the sun awning, was our electricity and our internet, such as it sometimes was.

Since then we've been drifting around the Rio, a day here, a night there, another run to town. After three days of watching how hard it was for the batteries to run the refrigeration - air and water have regularly approached 90 degrees (F!) -we turned off the freezer. Turned off the ice for licuados, mainly, and found some 'treasures' which have been dutifully, if nervously, consumed.

The pressure canner, Mason jars, and I are eyeing each other warily. It's still hot for cooking, although better at anchor than it was in the marina. Frankly, it's sometimes too hot to eat, although Doug never thinks so. We've left Sundog's good bread; time to start kneading,(or stop eating) and baking in the middle of the night just like the pros.

The shore power should be replaced by the solar panels and the wind generator, but there's often not much wind in the Rio. Rainy season, so quiescent that droughts are being declared inland, has poked its nose out far enough to shade the solar panels.

So we're moving towards the slow lane in energy too - no movies on the computer for Doug, no internet for me. Books!! And boy do I have a nice stash - Catfish and Mandala at present earning a top rating. At least until cruiser midnight, which I try to put off until at least 8 PM.

Gotta get the weatherfax and ham radio systems sorted out now that we've finally had the first 'tropical event' of our season here- technology on the boat has improved in the last score of years, but have I? The soothing chummy rhythm of a clear B&W fax pictures from NMG accompanies me right now, with a background of ethereal stellar roar, (and big numbers on the amps-going-out scale) so that's a reasonable metaphor. TD/TS/Cat1 Ida gone, cold front coming...energy being consumed everywhere.

Other slow lane indicators: writing in a notebook rather than typing in a power-sucking computer. Setting up a rain-catcher. Swimming in my laundry with a bar of soap (fresh water, ya know!)

Other 'back in cruising mode' indicators involve getting to know the boat and its systems all over again. Do either of us remember exactly what the sounder says as we run aground? Apparently not! Where did we put X, or y, or z? It's a pretty small space - where can this stuff go? I'm ashamed to admit that I get confused which boat is which, since I apparently do a lot of things rotely, without much actual thought. "Well, they used to be there, in the red line bag" I'll say, looking at a bag which once was blue (Absolute) and now is white.

Actually setting an actual sail meant decimation for generations of spiders; they flee as if from a police raid. The ant population supply line is interrupted; those crafty insects are still negotiating, trying to outsmart me, but no longer can rely on reinforcements, so the contest is evening out. Both 'insect overlays' have prospered during their time with us; pity they couldn't keep each other more in check or I'd have let them both stay.

Modern times: we've enrolled the customs agent Raul who has all our papers ready for Thursday morning. We'll "swing through" Livingston- to pick them up and spend the rest of our Quetzales, and be out with the tide at the end of the day, beating the Friday the Thirteenth jinx.

Birdwatching?

2009-10-26T21:38:00.001-06:00

It's not that I'm crazy about birds (not yet!), but I do like spending time with enthusiasts - anyone (almost) who has a deep enthusiasm and interest in something esoteric (confined to and understandable by only an enlightened inner circle).
PHOTO BINOCULAR LENSES

Birds generally are present in many, often pretty, places. Each species' individual story tells something curious, or fantasic, or just worth knowing about the world. Hence, a visit with the bird nerds.

Guatemala has plenty of interesting birds of its own. Think toucan and quetzal, then add the less famous but really cool trogon, differentiated hummingbirds, seed-eaters, woodpeckers. But wait! There's more! Many North American migratory species pass through or over-winter here, starting about now. Guatemala, the size of Ohio, has nearly as many species as the entire US/Canadian land mass.

So a handful of us strode off into the back lot of Hacienda Tijax, quite near Fronteras, our temporary 'home town'. Las senoras, from boats were easily identified by their extra-heavy night vision marine binoculars, quirky footwear, and lack of bird book or birding life list. But we caught on quickly enough, with a little help from our new friends. As always, keep your mind open and your mouth shut, and remember the golden rule. Also, on the canopy bridges, don't let your attention wander too far.
PHOTO TIJAX CANOPY BRIDGE

So, when all I would have seen was a distant little flutter, Leo or Meynor or Bryan (a young man who also taught us, in the guise of a drawing lesson, to notice the shape of the beaks, the feet, the wings, as well as a bit of birder vocabulary) would announce: "Oh, a white-collared seed eater." Heads swivel. Binoculars up. "Female" "ooh" pencils out to mark down the sighting, Howell's book out to show 'las senoras'.

The birds kept coming - in the hour or so before sunset we, or at least they, saw 17 different bird species, and knew them by first last and middle names, and sex, in several languages.
One of the most charming aspects of birdwatching in Guatemala is that English is the bird-nerd language; aficionados earnestly discuss anatomical features, such as the 'slatey' tail feathers which distinguish one trogon from the next ..., in English!

Probably somewhere, Cicero's ghost is gleefully saying 'and ya know, they still use Latin too!' All the guides knew those names as well.

Next day many more, many different, birds. And some real spectacles: the trogons were a colorful revelation.
PHOTO VIOLACEOUS TROGONPhoto by richard-seaman.com
The black-cowled oriole is related to my state bird, but I've never seen one in Maryland. The American redstart. The cuckoo something - I forgot to write it down, but remember Leo's description of the long swinging tail and my mental image of my grandmother's cuckoo clock.

And me, another spectacle. Now I've got a pencil and a book too, and a tangle of strings around my neck, connecting me to my hat, sunglasses, camera, pencil in my mouth, book under my arm. Ahha! So that's why they have those vests with all the little pockets! I hope this urge to accouter is not contagious.

I was very impressed with the enthusiasm and knowledge of the speakers. I was also impressed with the quality of the INGUAT-certified guides, not for the first time. In fact, as we noticed, we have almost never spent time with well-educated Guatemalans before. It was a treat.
PHOTO MEYNOR SCOPEMeynor was a wizard at setting up his 'scope' and making sure we all saw something.

So my visit to the nation of birdwatchers was a great success. Makes me think that from now on, rather than wandering around clueless, I'll find the local 'twitchers' as the Brits call birdwatchers, and see what they find interesting.
PHOTO ROW OF BIRDWATCHERS WITH GUIDE
Photo by Carole Webster.

Harvesting Rubber

2009-10-22T08:08:00.002-06:00

PHOTO GROVE OF RUBBER TREES

Think AIDS, which sent the consumption of latex gloves in medical facilities skyrocketing. Think latex condoms, which are available at nearly every checkout stand in most countries, but seem insufficiently used.

Think rubber mattresses, expensive, but ever so comfortable, I hear, and they last a lifetime. Think rubber boots and tarps. Or think vehicle tires, which is actually where most of the world's rubber production goes.

Where it comes from is here. At least some small fraction of the often-preferred natural product (most 'rubber' is synthesized from petroleum) comes from right here on the Rio Dulce. The tree, Hevea Brasiliensis, is a native of Brazil, local to Central America and was used by the Mayans for their rubber game balls. In some respects (climate, rain, sun), this Rio Dulce area is ideal for rubber plantations, and there are several.

Also, as I learned at Tijax, another local plantation, their trees are a cross between the Brazilian and a Malaysian variety. As well, during dry conditions, as we have had recently despite the so-called rainy season, tapping stops in the interest of arboreal health.

In 1844 Charles Goodyear patented the process of vulcanisation, the process of mixing raw rubber with sulphur under extreme heat. This made a cheaper more elasticated rubber. Gloves, and condoms, are made by dipping glass forms into liquid rubber.

As usual, most everything I 'know' I Googled. Here's some more.

In the world scheme of things, far more rubber is produced in the vicinity of Malayasia, Thailand, and India. The forest that was cleared to grow these trees may have been ecologically preferable to the orderly rowed plantations; but economic forces have their own logic. In La Esmerelda almost all the workers I see are young men; but in Southeast Asia, it's often women's work, which is to say, poorly paid.

Whenever I asked my informants about the harvesting work, they always refer to 'ulli' trees. Come to find out that 'ulli' is a Mayan word, meaning blood, or rubber. Also, one of the sometimes contradictory factoids of Google indicates that hevea brasilensis and the maple tree may be related. Or not, but it seems like they should be.

For reasons of tree hydraulics, the trees are tapped at night or very early in the morning. On my daybreak walks, I sometimes see people still wearing head-lights, and hear the scritch of their knives as they move from tree to tree opening the veins, so to speak. They could be tapping new latex every couple days, as in Asia, but I don't think it's that intensive here. I should go out in the wee hours sometime to make sure, (but probably won't).
PHOTO TREE TAPPER WITH KNIFE

The tree, handled skillfully, is said to be good for twenty years of latex. Then its wood, stronger than oak (according to the rubber-wood-marketing board), can be used for furniture etc.

Mexico may be Guatemala's main latex rubber customer. Factoid: rubber is the only naturally-grown product used in the automotive industry, with the possible previous exception of silk.

The Asians seem to try to keep their rubber in liquid form, which means using ammonia as a solvent, according to a Google site. Or, according to the guide at Tijax, a muriatic acid solution is used.
PHOTO TAPPED TREE DRIPPING

Here, the latex rubber is harvested in 'cup form' and as 'tree lace' (peeled from the drip line). Its processing involves a lot of heat, which destroys at least some of the proteins (latex allergies are blamed on proteins), and the result is solid rubber.

The workers leave their 'cup forms' and 'tree laces' beside the road for a tractor to pick up. Gnats seem to like this powerfully scented 'ulli'.
PHOTO RUBBER PRODUCT

For more info see
http://www.irrdb.com/irrdb/NaturalRubber/History/History5.htm
http://www.immune.com/rubber/nr1.html#e, or try Google, and see where you bounce!

A laugh on me

2009-10-21T19:20:00.001-06:00

How good is my Spanish these days? Well, here's how good it is.

I was sitting on a bar stool, waiting for Doug, lip-reading the paper (Diario), and drinking a licuado, when a man came up behind me and asked the lady behind the bar for 'el papel'. Guiltily, I closed the newspaper and pushed it toward him.
He looked at it, and me, a little sadly I thought, then at her. She handed him a roll of toilet paper and he went into the men's room.

A few seconds passed while I worked out what had transpired, then I began to chuckle. The bartender and the other customer exchanged a discreet few quiet words. I held up the Diario and said, in Spanish something like "i ingles, esta se llama el papel". Only then did they begin to laugh.

Later, another man came up to me. He told me I had a voice like Vicky Carr. I asked 'is Vicky Carr young and beautiful?" (no subjunctive for me). No, he said, she is like us. But he liked her because she had a beautiful voice and she sings English and Spanish both without an accent.

Best I can say for myself is that I laugh without an accent.

Early morning walks along the pipeline

2009-10-17T00:39:00.005-06:00

I had been walking three times a week with Kim, but she's away now, so now I go by myself. On the road by 5:30 AM-it's light but hasn't been for long, and home, primed for the day, just before 7. It's the best time of day.

My route is a road whose main purpose is to service the crude oil pipeline that runs alongside it, and maybe to supply the village of La Esmerelda, which is bounded by the river, the road and the marina.

There are more animals than people abroad at this, the rooster hour; also some very handsome chickens, pig families, even ducks, if it's been raining and their stream is flowing, and flocks of turkeys. Dogs sometimes appear in gangs, but they are sickly or juvenile two-faced bullies, most of these dogs, just the kind I'm not sure how to meet. Doug suggested I pick up some stones; it works! The mere bending over to pick them up is something the dogs have seen before, and not liked. They don't even know that I throw like a girl.

At the very end of La Esmerelda there's a house I always like to surreptitiously examine. It's a place with the 'wrong side of the tracks' written all over, and no proper sanitation facilities either. There's often a blazing cooking fire visible through the cracks in the board siding, bringing the pre-daybreak temperature well over 100 already. Luxury would be an outside cooking shelter and an enclosed outhouse separate from the well.

Does the woman of the house step from her hammock every morning eager to build that blazing fire? Or does she imagine another life - one that doesn't require such heat so early in service of so many people, for so long. Cultural expectations may vary. She might be wondering why I'm by myself, moving so fast in this climate and what my family is eating since I'm not there to make the tortillas.

The road is packed dirt road full of rounded river stones from kidney- to head-sized. Or rather, it's a stone road, with dirt infill. There are a number of hills I can never quite remember to count, but they're nicely arranged, as if laid out by cross-trainer software.

Beyond the village, the rubber plantation begins. The ranks of trees look old and well-established, as they stretch off into the distance. Some mornings are redolent with the not-altogether-pleasant scent of fresh-tapped rubber.

One little valley has been cleared, roughly, and planted with corn. There are a few areas of streams and ponds where the original vegetation remains. Here is where you'll see some nice butterflies and Bird-of-Paradise.

Then comes another plantation with different trees. We've identified these as gmolina, and believe it's being grown for pulp, or possibly lumber - more details to follow.

The gmolina gradually gives way to fairly recently cleared pasture land, sometimes with cows and/or horses, but mostly empty save for a few small birds.

The river Seja marks our usual stopping point, where we comment on how low the water levels are and how the rainy season never really got going. Occasionally we go all the way to 'the crossroads' where we often see men with machetes sitting patiently waiting, ?for a ride?

And the pipeline marches on, 275 miles long (so said my source, but now I think it might be kilometers), it starts in the far north of Guatemala, near the border with Mexico and its Tabasco oil fields, in a jungle and wetland area that was rebel-active in the civil war, which slowed down hydro-carbon resource development. In fact, under this rock are more sordid details about World Bank funding and hasty/sloppy environmental assessments which encouraged oil drilling in a rain forest.

According to http://www.quetzalnet.com/Trad_Inv.html#4

Guatemala has four sedimentary basins located in the north, south and eastern sections of the country, all with potential hydrocarbon reserves: southern Peten, northern Peten, Amatique and the Pacific. Exploration to date indicates the existence of both large and small fields, with recoverable reserves of between 20 and 30 million barrels of petroleum of varying API gravity, from heavy crude to medium and light grade.
Approximately 65% of Guatemala is covered by sedimentary rock, indicating the probability of finding oil in almost anywhere in the country.

The "tuberia" continues under the Rio Dulce and on to the Caribbean seaport of Puerto Barrios, where I think it is refined. Guatemala is the only Central American country that produces oil, and it still needs to import substantial amounts.

Perenco is a European-owned conglomerate.

Those men with machetes sometimes materialize to trim the vegetation that grows under the 'tubo'. The pipe shows signs of inspection and painting, and we see the occasional boat drill with towed containment booms on the river. Other pipeline regulars I meet, or at least wave at, are the rubber cutters, and a man we call 'El Guapo', the handsome. He speeds past, usually in a jeep or ATV, always wearing a white cowboy hat, and waves with an economical gesture.

Recently there have been other marina users of the pipeline road, later in the morning, but by then, it's a different road. Friendly women, men with paddles moving towards the rio, the kids who go to school (there are those who don't)all progress down the lane in their heartbreakingly clean clothes, wet combed hair, the scent of soap in their wake. "Buenas dias", a shy smile; as I clump on past, wishing the world weren't so complicated.

El Estor

2009-10-12T21:46:00.001-06:00

We took a little bus excursion for an overnight at El Estor, a small town on the north shore at the far end of Lago Izabal. You could take your own boat up the lake but most people don't - one security incident (theft) even a while back puts people off a place for years.
HPHOT MAP OF LAGO IZABAL

We were curious, having heard that originally this was a location where the Spanish stored treasure. When? What treasure? Where did it come from? How did it get down the narrow river gorges without being picked off? Lago Izabal was also how the coffee plantations in the highland state of Alta Verapaz connected to coastal shipping before trains and trucks arrived.

Nobody knows nuttin'about the Spanish- might be one of those stories that gets passed along because it sounds interesting and we want to believe it.

The next story about El Estor is its name: The Store, said Spanish style. This is true; the building still exists and is in fact the hotel, Vista del Lago, where we stayed, in a very small and basic room. A train line to carry coffee from the Highlands to Puerto Barrios on the coast passed this way starting sometime in the 1800s and The Store, started in the 1850s by two British gentlemen, was the only source for European goods for miles around. How many people wanted European goods? I can't even imagine.

Eventually a highway was built south of the lake and El Estor slipped back into near oblivion.

Things get active again in the 1960s when a high grade of nickel was discovered nearby. A Canadian company, via its Guatemalan subsidiary, put money into the town, building the roads and a town square, a hospital (now finally being restored for use), housing and schools, even a golf course for the employees.

Their plant stood a couple miles outside of town. It's still there under its tall smokestack, fenced off and guarded, looking like it could swing into some kind of action shortly.

Various technical and transportation difficulties shut it down in 1977, "much to the relief of the locals who had witnessed the decimation of the surrounding forests and rivers" says Shelagh McNally in Pocket Adventures Guatemala.

Our host at the hotel had been employed at the mine in its prime. He was happy to take us out there and tried to explain how the plant had been operated; neither of our language skills were sophisticated enough for some of the discussion. Apparently, they needed to generate a lot of electricity and eventually the price of diesel fuel for the power plant contributed to their demise.

What looks even clearer in El Estor than in our 'home town' of Fronteras is that many many people, maybe 80-90 percent? are the indigenous Mayan, K'iche'. Reading further into Shelagh McNally's book, I learned that land rights have been and continue to be of ongoing concern in this area. There was an infamous massacre here in 1978, 100 people gunned down by the Guatemalan army. Amnesty International came through in 1999 after a prominent human rights activist went, and stayed, missing. And in recent years, the Guatemalan military has violently evicted Mayan communities living on land the government preferred to transfer to international corporations.

Although there was successful community resistance to keep international oil drilling out of the lake, efforts to promote conservation and preservation in the area, which is quite near the extensive valley of the Rio Polochic BioReserve, are also fairly low-key.
PHOTO AMIGOS DE LAGO IZABAL

Since the nickel mine isn't running, and there aren't really any signs of a fishing industry, or a cattle industry, or much commercial agriculture, except on a very small scale, it's hard to say what makes the money go round.

At least that's the gist of what I've learned by Googling around, in particular from
http://books.google.com/books?id=x7CtmPL5DMQC&pg=PA235&lpg=PA235&dq=history+of+El+Estor&source=bl&ots=2F26N63lRh&sig=2ZfwhUd9vZEkjm5F04JB4WtdDWs&hl=en&ei=MJTOSqyVJsnR8Qax0sCBBA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1#v=onepage&q=history%20of%20El%20Estor&f=false
and
http://www.pbase.com/image/78083476
http://www.inriodulce.com/links/ElEstor.html

The orderly grid of streets, broad, with curbs and sidewalks, give El Estor a dignity unlike the usual bustling but ramshackle feel of other Guatemalan towns. I'm nearly certain that we were the only tourists in town, and after we'd been up two or three blocks, and over four more, everyone knew us as well.

We did our best to entertain them: taking pictures in a surprisingly well-stocked music store,
checking out an aguardiente (firewater, as in grain alcohol!) joint, watching cayugas get loaded (not with firewater!) for trips to even smaller villages somewhere.
We drank street-vendor drinks out of plastic bags, and a chocolate licuado made with Nesquick that was pretty good. We checked out a small eco-resort, visited the nickel mine, ate something delicious smokily cooked over an oil drum, and slept in our tiny lake view cabin.
Next day, as we had a tipico (refried beans, plantains, eggs, bit of cheese, tortillas, fresh juice) breakfast at a cafe overlooking the square, we tried to give part of it to a young boy, in neat clean clothes but clearly hungry, who had been watching us intently. The waitress intervened to stop us, 'on principle', the principle of not having their customers hit upon, I guess.

These folks were waiting for the bank to open. The line stretched half a block already and was still there when we left town an hour later. I went off to buy some Rio Polochic rice (sorry to report, it's undistinguished) and then we boarded the bus, clambering over the bundle of plastic plumbing pipe in the aisle (no chickens), towards Boqueron.

Boqueron

2009-10-12T21:05:00.000-06:00

Boqueron is a canyon/gorge of the Rio Sauce, along the north shore of Lago Izabal. It's a quite beautiful place, which is living in my memory, since I didn't want to carry anything that couldn't get wet. So, instead, here's a link a pair of photos taken by a man with hundreds of lovely pictures, many of people, from the entire country. I gather he was here as an observer during the exhumation of gravesites from the 36-year civil war. http://www.flickr.com/photos/mimundo/sets/72157603295975186/ Boqueron is at the end of this series.

You get off the bus, and will be instantly met by someone who wants to paddle you upstream. The family that lives closest seems to have the concession; We were paddled upstream in a wooden dugout cayuca with literally two knuckles-worth of freeboard. I did meet one Frenchman who said no one was home when he arrived so he just took a boat and paddled himself. OOOh, I said, you French can do things like that.

We gringoes left our packs in their house/tiny tienda, and changed out of our wet stuff when we got back so we didn't have to ride back soaking wet on the bus.

So let me just describe = what? Cliff walls loaded with plants, narrow clean fresh water river littered with jumbles of boulders. Central Casting sent a large electric blue butterfly and set design provided sunny blue skies.You can jump in the river and clumsily walk your way further upstream if you stay in the shallower water closer to the side. You could spend a couple hours there, especially if you had a picnic lunch.

I liked it.

Our man Miguel had five children. He had a little occasional work building the highway that was being paved literally outside his door, but tourism was down, times were tight, and he asked if he could come work on the boat with us.

Antigua

2009-10-04T07:37:00.003-06:00

The esteemed city of ‘La Muy Noble y Muy Leal Ciudad de Santiago de los Caballeros de Guatemala’, now known as Antigua, but once the capital of Guatemala, has an interesting history. The Spanish, after being pushed out of one town by Indian unrest, and down the slopes of the Agua Volcano by a mudslide, established a third city in this location, below the Agua Volcano, the Fuego Volcano and one other whose name isn't so easy to remember, here in 1543.

PHOTO VOLCANO

I can't really do better than to quote/paraphrase the Lonely Planet guide on the subject.

Antigua was once the epicenter of power throughout Central America. During the 17th and 18th centuries little expense was spared on the city's magnificent architecture, despite the fact that the ground rumbled ominously and regularly. Schools, hospitals, churches and monasteries sprung up, rivaled in magnificence only by the houses of the upper clergy and the politically connected.

At its peak about 1770, the city had 60,000 people, 33 churches, including a cathedral, a university, printing presses, newspaper, and a lively political and cultural scene, plus municipal water and sewer. The rumblings never stopped, however, and for a year the city was shaken by earthquakes and tremors of varying degrees until the great earthquake of July 29, 1773 destroyed the city, which had already suffered considerable damage. Two years later, the capital was transferred to Guatemala City.
Antigua was evacuated and plundered for building materials. Despite official decrees the city never emptied and by 1830 it began to grow again. Renovation of the battered buildings helped maintain the city's colonial character, said to have been modeled on that of Seville, Spain.

The city is littered with ruins which have lain in their fallen state for centuries. Other structures have been partially rebuilt, although not to their original designs and with pillaged materials. Until the mid-twentieth century, Antigua was apparently a poor and sleepy little town. Despite being declared a national monument in 1944 and a UNESCO world heritage site in 1979, it wasn't until the early 1990s that the city was 'discovered'. There's been, apparently, a lot of building since then, but you wouldn't know it since all is required to be in 'colonial ambiance', so even the new places look old.

And, as LP points out, the rubbish is actually collected here, the streets cleaned, stray dogs 'disappeared'; some electric wires even run underground.

Antigua is a town for pedestrians, sort of. The streets are severely cobbled, bone-jarring no matter what vehicle you're in the school-bus buses, the tourist shuttles, the private cars and picops, the tuk-tuks, or bicycles. Even the colonially-ambient horse-drawn carriages may not be immune.

The pedestrians can keep their teeth, but need a second pair of eyes to deal with uneven sidewalks that are barely 36" wide and that drop and climb for every entrance, every car or cart ramp, every water and sewer connection. So it's not a town to wander lost in reverie. Better to stand still and gawk than to invoke too many senses at once.

Like a woman in a hijab, Antigua hides a lot of its beauty.
Many little glimpses through open gates and doorways are of a fountain, a garden, something interesting, beautiful, surprising.
PHOTO BLUE FOUNTAIN INSIDE
I felt like an architectural ogler, leering at flowered patios and shaded corridors. Plus, we were constantly lost. The numbered calles run north and south and the avenidas east and west, (or vice versa?) so it would be do-able if only there were street signs and fewer identical looking walls.
Nonetheless, Antigua is a treat because it's so compact and so cosmopolitan, so different from other parts of Guatemala, even the modest portion we were privy to.

There are many similarities between Antigua and Annapolis: the restrictive physical layout, the time frame, the volcanic eruption/the silted harbor, the secret lives behind the sidewalk; even the population size of the geographical area is similar, and the greater cultural activity than offered in the hinterland. Also visitors descend each weekend from the capital 30 or 40 minutes away, parking their new cars in front of the high-end restaurants and hotels.

There's a neat cemetery, San Lazaro, which is an interesting choice of names. At first I was thinking of Lazarus who rose from the dead. Then I googled it and found another San Lazaro, a healer of physical and spiritual pain, in Cuban and other traditions. The morgue is conveniently located next to the office at the entry gate. At this cemetery, for the only time ever, I found the thing I casually look for at every cemetery I visit (which is most of them!). That is, someone who died the day I was born. Jose Braulio Perez might be a person whose torch I am carrying.

Visitors to Antigua find shops, and street vendors, mainly indigenous women selling native fabrics and clothing, jewelry, folk art.
It's a more attractive and less complicated transportation hub for visitors to the Guatemalan Highlands than the real capital, so all the tourist shuttles seem to go through. It's the commercial center for many surrounding villages.
PHOTO MCHETESTDIt's full of language schools, and those so inclined can do volunteer work at orphanages and indigenous settlements while they learn.

PHOTO TREES DOME VOLCANO

The ex-pat community has quite a presence here, I've heard. There is much more that could be said, probably should be said, about Antigua, of which I'm unaware. However, I've got LOTS of photos which I've dumped here
http://www.smugmug.com/gallery/9359930_6jL5U/1/626414976_f6JQd
so I'll let them do the talking. I promise, someday I'll shrink that file substantially.
Finally, no signs of life from the volcanoes or the ground, that I recognized. But days later a tsunami hit Samoa. And earthquakes killed many in Sumatra - not sure how the hope to be spared that is reflected in this cross.
PHOTO WHAT WE PRAY FOR

Back at School

2009-09-27T09:28:00.002-06:00

What is it about September? Back-to-school time seems to have been permanently imprinted on my mind. So it was that we found ourselves back in school, back in Antigua. PHOTO SCHOOLROOM

Yes, I know, according to the blog we haven't been to Antigua yet! But soon...
In fact we came up for a few days in August to scout around. Antigua is a place every tourist is expected to go, and a goodly number seem to fall in love with the city. We liked it fine, but it's a city of walls, and you're left wondering what's going on behind them. Also, you wonder where exactly you are, since, despite their personalities, few walls sport street signs. Coming to school here was a good way to explore a little further.

So, you might wonder, if we had trouble finding our way around a city laid out in a grid with prominent volcanoes to the south and west and a distinctly different hill to the north, why would we further overload our mental capacities by attending language school?

Mainly, so it's so we don't travel in a bubble. I can get by in Spanish in a very rough and inelegant manner, but the Guatemalans are too polite to correct me even when I ask them to. Doug wants to understand Spanish better too. Quite an language school industry has grown up around the clear and neutral Guatemalan accent in all the tourist destinations, but especially in Antigua. Despite the various learning aids on the boat we just weren't progressing well on our own.

We picked a school with large and meticulously landscaped gardens behind its gate, and really nice accommodations, San Jose El Viejo. The tranquility of our little 'resort', the two-minute commute, the fountains, the pool, ...I could really get used to this kind of upgrade to my life!PHOTO VIEW FROM OUR CASITA

Doug's teacher had the patience of Job, he announced, and, 'she can write upside down!' Mine had been dealing with people like me for at least half her life, and knew that her job was as much to break bad habits as to cement in some new stuff.

It was humbling to realize just how many bad habits I have. Neither of us expected miracles, especially in 32.5 hours of study in a week. The aging memory thing ...Well, I don't think my memory is that bad. It's just that I have to learn new packing techniques. So that's what I did all week. That, and try to slow myself down for quality production rather than quantity plus hand-waving. I might even be having a little glimmer of understanding of how my grandfather came to be the slow and (overly) precise man he was when he was about the age I am now.
PHOTO VIEW FROM CLASSROOM
Did I actually master the past and present tenses? How much of my new vocabulary will make a second appearance? Time will tell. I sure did enjoy my little vacation, though.
PHOTO SCHOOL SEAL ON DIPLOMA
If anyone reading this is looking for a recommendation, I would recommend everything about this school.

What I Learned at the Museums

2009-09-16T19:30:00.007-06:00

PLAIN HEAD
We spent several rewarding hours at the twin museums on the campus of Francisco Marroquin University, Zona 10, a half hour walk from our hotel in Guatemala City.

The Ixmel is full of textiles, looms, weavings, old photos, etc, curated in a modern style which I liked a lot. Also, some lovely 'primitive' paintings from an early 20th century Guatemalan artist whose grandchild could be drawing many of the same scenes today. And, some sophisticated watercolor portraits done by a British woman who I think had a coffee plantation in the hills.

After this, no photos were allowed in the textile museum- fragile colors. Lo siento.

In the Ixmel, you'll start to realize just what you're seeing when you look at Mayan women on the street. What I see is an astonishing number of women all wearing the same thing, a voluminously pleated modest skirt plus a blouse, and an overblouse of a lacy material, which strikes me as modesty made practical in a tropical climate. Inland I also saw huipil, which is a different kind of blouse with much embroidery (once done by hand, now more machine embroidered) around the neckline.
Considering the heat, and the need to breast-feed, and the lack of sanitary facilities, I guess it's a reasonable rig, even though it looks like more cloth than necessary, and hot.

What I hadn't fully appreciated before Ixmel was the individuality of the fabrics and the embroidery. Each locale has something special, and for someone who can read the signs (which might be every Guatemalan) there's a wealth of information being conveyed. Also, I hadn't considered the apron as a fashion accessory, but you'll regularly see tucked and ruffled aprons on the streets of the city.

There are plenty of women in traditional dress, but others, including men, and youth, wear the 21st century uniform. A side note about clothing: one of the places you can buy clothes is at a ropa americana. Sometimes there's a storefront, but often you'll see being sold in the back of a truck, on a tarp on the ground, or maybe even on hangers, what looks like the overflow, like what goes to Goodwill, Salvation Army and Frenchy's. Not being a size 1 chica, it's where I'd shop if I needed something, which thankfully I don't.
Here, if you care to dig, you'll find larger-than-Mayan sizes and sometimes better quality- at least it was originally. I see lots of people, especially men, wearing 'ropa americana' t-shirts, without a care about the logo. Howard's Plumbing, Palm Beach Polo Club, it seems that Guatemala is downstream from every t-shirt ever printed. Sometimes it works: a cute little girl in a pink shirt with sequins reading "Precious". And sometimes it doesn't: a skinny older man whose t-shirt read: "Nobody Knows I'm Really a Lesbian".

Popul Voh Museum is artifacts from various ruins throughout the country. You can pay 15Q extra and take pictures. Doug frowned ("there's nothing worse than a tourist with a camera" is his view), but I paid, happily (the camera has a better memory than I do) and here's a little of what I saw.

The Popul Vuh Museum is named after a book, one of the few to survive, which describes the Mayan myth of creation. The collection was once private and is noted for its pre-Columbian (that's Before Christopher Columbus to me!) funerary art and its bowls and vessels.
Pictured below is a photo of a reproduction of part of another of the very few surviving Mayan manuscripts, the Dresden Codex. This is an example of the source material upon which our current knowledge is based.

"The Dresden Codex contains astronomical tables of outstanding accuracy. It is most famous for its Lunar Series and Venus table...The Dresden Codex contains predictions for agriculturally-favorable timing[citation needed]. It has information on rainy seasons, floods, illness and medicine. It also seems to show conjunctions of constellations, planets and the Moon."

Wikipedia

I liked all the funerary 'urns', though they did seem rather small.

But what really struck me was the small sculptures and the busts, perhaps because they were so personably captioned. It was like looking at a centuries-old photo album. At last I felt like I was peeking into Mayan daily life.

For instance, here are little heads displaying the variety of hairstyles available, indicating, according to the caption, an interest in fashion. I can relate!

Effigies emphasized feminine charm and sensuality and point out that young goddesses played important mythological roles. The one on the left particularly, I can see in that kind of function. She might be 14, on the streets of Fronteras, or Birmingham, Alabama.

The youths, male variety, of the nobility, were strenuously educated in the arts and writing, cults of the gods and military arts. These guys look like they're just hanging out on the corner though, as surely those youths also did.

Here's a warrior (not a Warrior), wearing cotton armor, carrying square shield and mace. They often wear masks and helmets decorated with animals, said the sign. In fact, in some cases, the warrior's victims were flayed, which is to say skinned, and their 'features' worn as a mask. What a reminder!
WARRIOR
Musicians, players of the drums, turtle carapaces, rattles and trumpets, were an important part of many ceremonies, including sacrifices. This is a pretty terrible picture, admittedly, but you can see the guy on the right is the drummer in this band. The odd colors are interesting to me, but not desirable photographically, since they apparently indicate 'noise'.

The abuelas, "aged women"(!), were important in domestic and religious life too, as midwives, and in myth, where the heroes were often orphans raised by their grandmother. I guess their warrior fathers didn't make it home.

Large noses and crossed eyes were considered attractive.

Mainly what I learned at the museum is that, when (okay, if) our culture, like that of the Mayans, mysteriously disappears as a result of environmental degradation and greedy heedless behavior, our successors might have a museum much like this one, same captions, but slightly different illustrations. Let's see, Vogue magazine, Forest Lawn, silicon breast implants, ...

Hope you enjoyed the tour!

for more pictures look at
www.maya-archaeology.org/museums/popolvuh/popolvuhpictures.php -

Edited 18 Sept.

Morning Soundscape with Howler Monkeys

2009-09-09T09:00:00.020-06:00

I love to lie (or is that lay?) in bed a few minutes each morning with my ears wide open. Our boarding plank creaks. Early outboards head out the creek. Some mornings it rains. This morning precipitation was so light that the awning barely spoke. The night watchman makes his final rounds, and if it's Julio, I can hear him pop the shells out of his gun right before he leaves.

Bird song is what I most like to hear. It's cheery and perky and insinuates itself so sweetly into my waning dreams. But I'm getting used to the howler monkeys who live in the jungle across the river and start their day well before sunrise. photo courtesy of npr

A lovely lullaby their call is not, although doubtless it's music, or at least data, to their own ears. Thanks to an enlarged bone, the hypoid, near their vocal chords, they rank as one of the world's loudest animals, with a range of 3 miles, says the Guinness Book of World Records.

Supposedly they're calling to check in with other groups of howlers at dawn and dusk. As folivores, they inhabit and ingest the jungle canopy; it's a low-energy food supply, so maybe they watch their spacing as well as check in on the daily net.

Howler monkeys to me sound like a slow-motion wreck, or like a terribly sick and suffering someone. Paradigm shift: better to celebrate them as what they are: the thrilling sound of a tropical jungle large enough to support them.

Would you like to listen? Click here.

Like the sound? It's available as a ringtone. You might not have any trouble deciding whose calls to assign this sound to.

If birdsong soothes me, what might a howler monkey find relaxing? Funny you should ask, because just the other day I read about a study wherein scientists recorded both alarm sounds and easy-going sounds of cotton-topped tamarins, another vocal monkey species. A cellist then 'translated' the calls into 'cello-ese', sped the tape up to monkey-chirp speed, and played it to their (captive) tamarin audience. I wasn't surprised to learn that the alarm-based recordings alarmed and the easy-listening soothed the tamarins. Probably the same with gangsta rap.
(http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/09/06/AR2009090601990_2.html)

Wikipedia's listing says:
Guatemalan Black Howler (alouatta pigra) males are larger than those of any other Central American monkey species. On average, males weigh 11.4 kg (25 lb) and females weigh 6.4 kg (14 lb). The body is between 521 and 639 mm (20.5 and 25.2 in) in length, excluding tail. The tail is between 590 and 690 mm (23 and 27 in) long...Lifespan can be 15-20 years.

As with other species, the majority of the Guatemalan
Black Howler's day is spent resting. Eating makes up about a quarter of
the day, moving about 10% of the day, and the remainder of the day is
spent in socializing and other activities.

One activity reported in Tikal was particularly striking.
HOWLER DEFECATING SIGN Doug went out of his way to get out from under the ones we saw there. I just kept my eyes open and my mouth shut, and the monkeys brachiated on by.

Of course, howler monkeys are considered an endangered species, but apparently not critically so just yet. Somewhere I read that these monkeys are too ill-tempered to make good pets. Loss of habitat is an issue, of course. Being used as food is also a problem for these monkeys, but I have been asking around and can't find anyone at least in the Rio Dulce area who has ever participated in monkey killing or eating (or will admit to it).
This poor soul was one of a troupe trapped in a concrete jungle near the airport runway at the Aurora Zoo in Guatemala City. I mean concrete jungle literally - all of the things, with the possible exception of the tree in this picture= that look natural, like bamboo or wood, even rock, aren't. They're concrete, artistically done, and we can probably guess the reason. The sponsors who support the zoo, like Bimbo Bread, Pepsi, and Purina, well, they're not in the zoo business. But that's another story.

Los Amigos Youth Hostel, Flores

2009-08-30T03:32:00.004-06:00

Once I learned that they had some private rooms, and that I wouldn't have to sleep in a dorm or bunk bed with snorers and farters with whom I was unacquainted, I was all in favor of a night at the youth hostel in Flores. It's been years - decades - since I stayed in such a place, so I guess it qualifies as a remote nation, one as curious as Chad or China. There aren't many people under 40 or even 50 in our circles on the Rio Dulce, which is a sad thing to admit!

As a 'coming of age' birthday present - I was 18 or 19 -my parents gave me a Eurailpass and a cheap round-trip ticket to Luxembourg. I left the next week and spent a couple months on the move, with not a backpack but a knapsack, before returning for my last year of college. It was a most formative experience, and I was glad to see that there are still so many young people on a similar quest now.

Los Amigos, the hostel, is in the center of town of Flores, which itself is a smallish island in a lake, connected to the mainland by a causeway. Whatever Mayan facilities once existed here were destroyed by the Spanish hundreds of years ago. The locals themselves are in the process of destroying the streets, replacing the cobblestones with interlocking pavers which will be wonderful, in another year or so.

Beyond the foyer it was a pleasant surprise to find a large courtyard as well as second story rooms and rooftop palapas. Banana trees, vines and flowers, even fresh-hatched quail in lieu of the customary chickens. Artists with a vivid palette and great sense of humor had made their marks throughout.

Our compact room with cordovan-colored walls, navy-blue sheets, electric fan and window to the courtyard cost a whopping $10. There were two kinds of dorm room, maybe half a dozen private rooms, and also hammock-sleeping spaces under a roof upstairs, which might have cost $2 per night. So you can see that Guatemala on $5 a day might be as do-able as Europe on $5 a day was years ago. Which is to say, barely. Still, the folks in the cheap seats are having just as much fun as in the front row.

Like a cat on a windowsill, I parked myself and my book in a hammock in a leafy little nook upwind of the parrot and just inside the rainshower drip line and dozily listened to the conversations around me. This is an active and vibrant hostel, lots of coming and going.

I love listening to non-native English speakers using English as their common language.Young men sharing shopping tips, young women telling young men how to hitch-hike, that sort of stuff.

Several were going back to school in the fall, but several others were between jobs, or just travelling. A three-generation family was there, including a little girl who loved being pushed on the swing, and an older woman with luggage so big I wondered if she was shipping herself. A Belgian quartet arrived carrying a trumpet and something like an organ keyboard powered by blowing through a tube. They played for us all afternoon, and later that night they played at the Flores central plaza to a smallish but receptive audience of Guatemalans, who sent little girls in party dresses to drop Quetzales into their hat.

I got a kick out of the equipment the backpackers carried. The packs themselves look so much more sleek, organized than mine, and clean and new. One woman showed me her two favorite items - a silky sheet-sleeping bag liner, and a miracle towel (never wet, never dirty, never smelly!) made of miracle fiber. That sounds great - it's a challenge to get a towel dry before it festers.

But otherwise, we were pretty much out of it, conversationally. Not that no one would talk to us - they would, if we started it. Otherwise, we were nearly invisible, or irrelevant. Fine by me! I never went too far out of my way to chat up someone older than my mother either, and only recently do I wonder what I might have missed. That's one of the reasons I'm here, to make up for lost time.

The kitchen at Los Amigos is vegetarian and it puts out great food at great prices, worth going for even if you're not staying there. An avocado licuado, sugar added, is nearly a meal in itself. (Somewhere I read that Antiguans have a nickname based on the extreme availability of avocados in their diet). Tough to fit the country's best vegetable lasagne in afterwards, not to mention the brownie.

The staff is friendly and hardworking, which is good because a few things haven't changed about youth. They're not always tidy, and they still think they're invulnerable. Mainly I was disappointed to see how many smokers there were in this educated and advantaged group of people. It was hard to find fresh air in the courtyard at times. Do these Europeans and Australians think they're immune?

But I hope that I was as clued-up and tuned-in to the world when I was that age (and a smoker) as those kids around the table at Los Amigos while I was there.

Any questions?

Overheard: Australian lad says to American: "They want you to put your toilet paper in the bin." American: "In the bed? That doesn't sound right."

YaXha

2009-08-26T09:08:00.005-06:00

this photo courtesy of dleiva at flickr

I'm pretty sure this place, YaXha, will be at the top of my favorite ruins list no matter how many I end up visiting. A knowledgeable local sent us here. Our guide at Tikal reminded us that the 2005 TV series, Survivor Guatemala was filmed at YaXha, and that he was featured on Day 25, or was it 27. It's also in the area preserved as part of the Mayan Biosphere, although I was sorry to see a bulldozer flattening everything, possibly for cattle pasture, right up to the perimeter.

Getting to YaXha from Tikal via public transportation (collectivo) was looking complicated, time-consuming and not without hassle, so we ended up in a taxi-van straightaway. After 75 kms, 11 of which were up a side road, we were glad we did. From our 'eco-lodge' it was another 45 minutes of walking up the hill to the site. Chak, the lodge's black Lab, who was well-known at the admission gate ("un perro muy noble"), proudly showed us the way. But when we got to the actual ruins, we found that he was 'our' dog, but not allowed in (he might chase monkeys!) So we scrounged a piece of rope, tied him outside the bathrooms and collected him on the way home.

YaXha is atop a hill between two lakes, the green one and the blue one, from whence it derives its name. In its time, it was connected by road (and, sometimes, political alliance) to Tikal and to other ruins even further in the jungle (which of course wasn't necessarily jungle then), and to other small unexcavated sites around the lakes. With maybe 40,000 people and 500 structures, it might have lacked Tikal's cosmopolitan flavor, but it does have, to my mind, the superior location.

I read somewhere that the restoration is only two years old, and privately funded by Deutschebank. Can't say if this is why there were reader boards about the architecture, with pictures of what each area might have looked like and small explanations about cultural matters, helpful even in Spanish.

The stairways are so nicely built, with rounded handrails, framed edges, plugged screws and consistently even treads, that when we got to the top of Temple 216 - the big one in the North Acropolis with the east-west view - we commented to the guard. He replied that some of the tourists were "muy gorda"- very fat.

In fact each area had a guard/docent who was willing, even eager (it was a quiet day and not each guard brought a transistor radio!) to talk, although maybe not particularly knowledgeable. They changed areas every 8 days, from the top of the temple to the ballcourt to the viewing stand in the treetops with the monkeys. Some days there are a hundred tourists, other days ten - you can't say the place is overrun!

Another point in YaXha's favor was that a lot of the undergrowth had been cleared, leaving big canopy trees with open spaces between them for that most comforting of landscapes, the feeling of shelter without claustrophobia.

Plus when the monkeys swing through, they're easier to see.

The 'eco-lodge' El Sombrero, on the lakefront beneath YaXha, is the only place to stay for miles, but it's nice, so no hardship.

The owner was away, we were the only guests, and even the staff left after dinner so we had the hotel, and probably the lake and the ruins, to ourselves, except for a couple dogs.
I thought how nice a swim in the lake would be; the 'danger of crocodiles' sign was one thing, but a huge crocodile skull on the ledge put teeth into the sign, you could say.

All the drinking water comes from the lake too, 'filtered'.

We were offered a ride back down the 11 km road to the highway, one at a time on the back of a motorcycle, but decided to walk instead. And before too too long we'd hitched the ride in the back of a pickup with a couple guys on their way somewhere with bowls of soaked corn. They were glad to know we had appreciated YaXha, but said we really should go to Naranja, 25 km past YaXha. That, they said, is 'el capital del jungle'.